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ON SELF-CULTURE 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



FOUR PHASES OF MORALS 

Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism, i vol., i2mo. Cloth, 

#1-50 



ON 



SELF-CULTURE 



Intellectual, Physical, and Moral 



& habc Jttecum for Smtng Mm axib Stufonis 



BY 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 



NEW YORK 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, AND COMPANY 

1874 



LC3i 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE : 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BV 

H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



/c 



CONTENTS. 



The Culture of the Intellect .... 7 
On Physical Culture . . . . . 53 

On Moral Culture . . . . . . • 73 



THE CULTURE OF THE 
INTELLECT 

Es ist immer gut etwas zu wissen. — Goethe 



THE 

CULTURE OF THE INTELLECT. 



I. In modern times instruction is communi- 
cated by means of Books. Books are no doubt 
very useful helps to knowledge, and in some 
measure also, to the practice of useful arts and 
accomplishments ; but they are not, in any 
case, the primary and natural sources of cul- 
ture, and, in my opinion, their virtue is not a 
little apt to be overrated, even in those branches 
of acquirement where they seem most indis- 
pensable. They are not creative powers in 
any sense ; they are merely helps, instruments, 
tools, and even as tools they are only artificial 
tools, superadded to those with which the 
wise prevision of Nature has equipped us, like 
telescopes and microscopes, whose assistance 
in many researches reveals unimagined won- 
ders, but the use of which should never tempt 
us to undervalue or to neglect the exercise of 
our own eyes. The originaland proper sources 
of knowledge are not books, but life, experience, 



10 THE CULTURE OF 

personal thinking, feeling, and acting. When 
a man starts with these, books can fill up many 
gaps, correct much that is inaccurate, and ex- 
tend much that is inadequate ; but, .without 
living experience to work on, books are like 
rain and sunshine fallen on unbroken soil. 

-" The parchment roll is that the holy river, 

From which one draught shall slake the thirst forever ? 

The quickening power of science only he 

Can know, from whose own soul it gushes free." 

This is expressed, no doubt, somewhat in a 
poetical fashion, but it contains a great general 
truth. As a treatise on mineralogy can con- 
vey no real scientific knowledge to a man who 
has never seen a mineral, so neither can works 
of literature and poetry instruct the mere 
scholar who is ignorant of life, nor discourses 
on music him who has no experience of sweet 
sounds, nor gospel sermons him who has no 
devotion in his soul or purity in his life. All 
knowledge which comes from books comes in- 
directly, by reflection, and by echo ; true 
knowledge grows from a living root in the 
thinking soul ; and whatever it may appro- 
priate from without, it takes by living assimi- 
lation into a living organism, not by mere 
borrowing:. 



■&• 



II. I therefore earnestly advise all young 



THE INTELLECT. II 

men to commence their studies, as much as 
possible, by direct Observation of Facts, 
and not by the mere inculcation of statements 
from books. A useful book was written with 
the title, — " How to Observe." These three 
words might serve as a motto to guide us in 
the most important part of our early education 
— a part, unfortunately, only too much neg- 
lected. All the natural sciences are particu- 
larly valuable, not only as supplying the mind 
with the most rich, various, and beautiful fur- 
niture, but as teaching people that most useful 
of all arts, how to use their eyes. It is as- 
tonishing how much we all go about with our 
eyes open, and yet seeing nothing. This is 
because the organ of vision, like other organs, 
requires training ; and by lack of training and 
the slavish dependence on books, becomes dull 
and slow, and ultimately incapable of exercising 
its natural function. Let those studies, there- 
fore, both in school and college, be regarded 
as primary, that teach young persons to know 
what they are seeing, and to see what they 
otherwise would fail to see. Among the most 
useful are, Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Ge- 
ology, Chemistry, Architecture, Drawing, and 
the Fine Arts. How many a Highland ex- 
cursion and continental tour have been ren- 
dered comparatively useless to young persons 



12 THE' CULTURE OF 

well drilled in their books, merely from the 
want of a little elementary knowledge in these 
sciences of observation. 

TIL Observation is good, and accurate ob- 
servation is better ; but, on account of the 
vast variety of objects in the universe, the ob- 
serving faculty would be overwhelmed and 
confounded, did we not possess some sure 
method of submitting their multitude to a cer- 
tain regulative principle placing them under 
the control of our minds. This regulative 
principle is what we call Classification, and 
is discoverable by human reason, because it 
clearly exists everywhere in a world which is 
the manifestation of Divine reason. This 
classification depends on the fundamental unity 
of type which the Divine reason has imposed 
on all things. This unity manifests itself in 
the creation of points of likeness in things 
apparently the most different ; and it is these 
points of likeness which, when seized by a 
nicely observant eye, enable it to distribute 
the immense variety of things in the world 
into certain parcels of greater or less compass, 
called genera and species, which submit them- 
selves naturally to the control of a comparing 
and discriminating mind. The first business 
of the student, therefore, is, in all that he sees, 



THE INTELLECT. 1 3 

to observe carefully the points of likeness, and, 
along with these, also the most striking points 
of difference ; for the points of difference go 
as necessarily along with the points of likeness, 
as shadow goes along with light ; and though 
they do not of themselves constitute any actual 
thing, yet they separate one genus from an- 
other, and one species of the same genus from 
another. The classification or order to be 
sought for in all things is a natural order ; 
artificial arrangements, such as that of words 
in an alphabetical dictionary, or of flowers in 
the Linnaean system of botany, may be useful 
helps to learners in an early stage, but, if ex- 
clusively used, are rather hindrances to true 
knowledge. What a young man should aim 
at is to acquire a habit of binding things to- 
gether according to their bonds of natural 
affinity ; and this can be done only by a com- 
bination of a broad view of the general effect, 
with an accurate observation of the special 
properties. The names given by the common 
people to flowers are instances of superficial 
similarity, without any attempt at discrimina- 
tion, as when a water-lily seems by its name 
to indicate that it is a species of lily, with 
which flower it has no real connection. A 
botanist, on the other hand, who has minutely 
observed the character and organs of plants, 



14 THE CULTURE OF 

* 

will class a water-lily rather with the papav- 
erous or poppy family, and give you very 
good reasons for doing so. In order to assist 
in forming habits of observation in this age 
of locomotion, I should advise young men 
never to omit visiting the local museums of 
any district, as often as they may have an op- 
portunity ; and when there to confine their 
attention generally to that one thing which 
is most characteristic of the locality. Looking 
at everything generally ends in remembering 
nothing. 

IV. Upon the foundation of carefully-ob- 
served and well-assorted facts the mind pro- 
ceeds to build a more subtle structure by the 
process which we call Reasoning. We would 
know not only that things are so and so, but 
how they are, and for what purpose they are. 
The essential unity of the Divine Mind causes 
a necessary unity in the processes by which 
things exist and grow, no less than a unity in 
the type of their manifold genera and species ; 
and into both manifestations of Divine unity 
we are, by the essential unity of our divinely 
emanated human souls, compelled to inquire. 
Our human reason, as proceeding from the Di- 
vine reason, is constantly employed in working 
out a unity or consistency of plan, to speak 



THE INTELLECT. 1 5 

more popularly, in the processes of our own 
little lives ; and we are thus naturally deter- 
mined to seek for such a unity, consistency, 
and necessary dependence, in all the operations 
of a world which exists only, as has been well 
said, " in reason, by reason, and for reason." 1 
The quality of mind, which determines a man 
to seek out this unity in the chain of things, is 
what phrenologists call causality ; for the cause 
of a thing, as popularly understood, is merely 
that point in the necessary succession of di- 
vinely-originated forces which immediately pre- 
cedes it. There are few human beings so con- 
tentedly superficial as to feed habitually on the 
knowledge of mere unexplained facts ; on the 
contrary, as we find every day, the ready as- 
sumption of any cause for a fact, rather than 
remain content with none, afford sample proof 
that the search for causes is characteristic of 
every normal human intellect. What young 
men have chiefly to look to in this matter is to 
avoid being imposed on by the easy habit of 
taking an accidental sequence or circumstance 
for a real cause. It may be easy to understand 
that the abundant rain on the west coast of 
Britain is caused by the vicinity of the 'Atlan- 
tic Ocean; and not very difficult to compre- 
hend how the comparative mildness of the 

1 Stirling on Protoplasm — a masterly tract. 



1 6 THE CULTURE OF 

winter season at Oban, as compared with Edin- 
burgh or Aberdeen, is caused by the impact of 
a broad current of warm water from the Gulf 
of Mexico. But in the region of morals and 
politics, where facts are often much more com- 
plex, and passions are generally strong, we con- 
stantly find examples of a species of reasoning 
which assumes without proving the causal de- 
pendency of the facts on which it is "based. I 
once heard a political discourse by a noted 
demagogue, which, consisted of the assertion, 
in various forms and with various illustrations, 
of the proposition that all the miseries of this 
country arise from its monarchico-aristocratic 
government, and that they could all be cured, 
as by the stroke of a magician's wand, by the 
introduction of a perfectly democratic govern- 
ment — a species of argumentation vitiated, as 
is obvious all through, by the assumption of 
one imaginary cause to all social evils, and an 
equally imaginary cure. In the cultivation of 
habits of correct reasoning, I would certainly, 
in the first place, earnestly advise young men 
to submit themselves for a season, after the old 
Platonic recipe, to a system of thorough mathe- 
matical training. This will strengthen the 
binding power of the mind, which is necessary 
for all sorts of reasoning, and teach the inex- 
perienced really to know what necessary de- 



THE INTELLECT. 1 7 

pendence, unavoidable sequence, or pure caus- 
ality means. But they must not stop here ; for 
the reasonings of mathematics being founded 
on theoretical assumptions and conditions 
which, when once given, are liable to no vari- 
ation or disturbance, can never be an adequate 
discipline for the great and most important 
class of human conclusions, which are founded 
on a complexity of curiously acting and react- 
ing facts and forces liable to various disturbing 
influences, which even the wisest sometimes 
fail to calculate correctly. On political, moral, 
and social questions, our reasonings are not less 
certain than in mathematics ; they are only 
more difficult and more comprehensive ; and 
the great dangers to be avoided here are one- 
sided observation, hasty conclusions, and the 
distortion of intellectual vision, caused by per- 
sonal passions and party interests. The poli- 
tician who fails in solving a political problem, 
fails not from the uncertainty of the science, 
but either from an imperfect knowledge of the 
facts, or from the action of passions and inter- 
ests, which prevent him from making a just ap- 
preciation of the facts. 

V. At this point I can imagine it is not un- 
likely that some young man may be inclined to 
ask me whether I should advise him, with the 



1 8 THE CULTURE OF 

view of strengthening his reasoning powers, to 
enter upon a formal study of logic and meta- 
physics. To this I answer, By all means, if you 
have first, in a natural way, as opposed to mere 
scholastic discipline, acquired the general habit 
of thinking and reasoning. A man has learned 
to walk first by having legs, and then by using 
them. After that he may go to a drill-sergeant 
and learn to march, and to perform various tac- 
tical evolutions, which no experience of mere 
untrained locomotion can produce. So exactly 
it is with the art of thinking. Have your 
thinking first, and plenty to think about, and 
then ask the logician to teach you to scrutinize 
with a nice eye the process by which you have 
arrived at your conclusions. In such fashion 
there is no doubt that the study of logic may 
be highly beneficial. But as this science, like 
mathematics, has no real contents, and merely 
sets forth in order the universal forms under 
which all thinking is exercised, it must always 
be a very barren affair to attempt obtaining 
from pure logic any rich growth of thought that 
will bear ripe fruit in the great garden of life. 
One may as well expect to make a great patriot 
— a Bruce or a Wallace — of a fencing master, 
as to make a great thinker out of a mere logi- 
cian. So it is in truth with all formal studies. 
Grammar and rhetoric are equally barren, and 



THE INTELLECT. 1 9 

bear fruit only when dealing with materials 
given by life and experience. A meagre soul 
can never be made fat, nor a narrow soul large, 
by studying rules of thinking. An intense vi- 
tality, a wide sympathy, a keen observation, a 
various experience, is worth all the logic of the 
schools ; and yet the logic is not useless ; it 
has a regulative, not a creative virtue ; it is 
useful to thinking as the study of anatomy is 
useful to painting ; it gives you a more firm 
hold of the jointing and articulation of your 
framework ; but it can no more produce true 
knowledge than anatomy can produce beautiful 
painting. It performs excellent service in the 
exposure of error and the unveiling of sophis- 
try ; but to proceed far in the discovery of im- 
portant truth, it must borrow its' moving power 
from fountains of living water, which flow not 
in the schools, and its materials from the facts 
of the breathing universe, with which no mu- 
seum is furnished. So it is likewise with meta- 
physics. This science is useful for two ends, 
first — to acquaint ourselves with the necessary 
limits of the human faculties ; it tends to clip 
the wings of our conceit, and to make us feel, 
by a little floundering and flouncing in deep 
bottomless seas of speculation, that the world 
is a much bigger place than we had imagined, 
and our thoughts about it of much less signifi- 



20 * THE CULTURE OF 

cance. A negative result this, you will say, but 
not the less important for that ; the knowledge 
of limits is the first postulate of wisdom, and 
it is better to practice walking steadily on the 
solid earth to which we belong, than to usurp 
the function of birds, like Icarus, and achieve 
a sorry immortality by baptizing the deep sea 
with our name. The other use of metaphysics 
is positive ; it teaches us to be familiar with 
the great fundamental truths on which the fab- 
ric of all the sciences rests. Metaphysics is 
not, like logic, a purely formal science ; it. is, 
on the contrary, the science of fundamental 
and essential reality, of that which underlies 
all appearances, as the soul of a man underlies 
his features and his fleshly framework, and sur- 
vives all changes as their permanent type. It 
is that which we come to when we get behind 
the special phenomena presented by individual 
sciences ; it is neither botany, nor physiology, 
nor geology, nor astronomy, nor chemistry, nor 
anthropology, but those general, all-pervading, 
and all-controlling powers, forces, and essences, 
of which each special branch of knowledge is 
only a single aspect or manifestation ; it is the 
common element of all -existence ; and as all 
existence is merely a grand evolution of self- 
determining reason (for, were it not for the in- 
dwelling reason the world would be a chaos 



THE . INTELLECT. 21 

and not a cosmos), it follows that metaphysics 
is the knowledge of the absolute or cosmic 
reason so far as it is knowable by our limited 
individualized reason, and is therefore, as Aris- 
totle long ago remarked, identical with theol- 
ogy. 1 Indeed, the idea of God as the absolute 
self-existent, self-energizing, self-determining 
Reason, is the only idea which can make the 
world intelligible, and has justly been held fast 
by all the great thinkers of the world, from 
Pythagoras down to Hegel, as the alone key- 
stone of ail sane thinking. By all means, 
therefore, let metaphysics be studied, especially 
in this age and place, where the novelty of a 
succession of brilliant discoveries in physical 
science, coupled with a one-sided habit of 
mind, swerving with a strong bias towards 
what is outward and material, has led some 
men to imagine that in mere physics is wis- 
dom to be found, and that the true magician's 
wand for striking out the most important re- 
sults is induction. This is the very madness 
of externalism ; for, on the one hand, the funda- 
mental and most vital truths from which the 
possibility of all science hangs, assert them- 
selves before all induction ; and, on the other, 
the physical sciences merely describe se- 

1 rpla yevT) tosv dewp-qriKcov iirKTTTj/xav 

^vcritt)}, fia9r}fj.ariKi] t deoXoyiici}. — Metaph. x. 7. 



22 THE CULTURE OF 

quences, which the superficial may mistake for 
causes. Their so-called laws are merely meth- 
ods of operation ; and the operator, of whom, 
without transgressing their special sphere, they 
can take no account, is always and everywhere 
the absolute, omnipresent, all-plastic Reason, 
which we call God, whose offspring, as the 
pious old Greek poet sung, we all are, and in 
whom, as the great apostle preached, we live, 
and move, and have our being. An essentially 
reasonable theology, and an essentially reverent 
speculation, are the metaphysics which a young 
man may fitly commence to seek after in the 
schools, but which he can find only by the ex- 
perience of a truthful and a manly life ; and he 
will then know that he has found it, when, like 
King David and the noble army of Hebrew 
psalmists, he can repose upon the quiet faith 
of it, like a child upon the bosom of its mother. 

VI. The next function of the mind which re- 
quires special culture is the Imagination. I 
much fear neither teachers nor scholars are suf- 
ficiently impressed with the importance of a 
proper training of this faculty. Some there 
may be who despise it altogether, as having to 
do with fiction rather than with fact, and of no 
value to the severe student who wishes to ac- 
quire exact knowledge. But this is not the 



THE INTELLECT. 2$ 

case. It is a well-known fact that the highest 
class of scientific men have been led to their 
most important discoveries by the quickening 
power of a suggestive imagination. Of this the 
poet Goethe's original observations in botany 
and osteology may serve as an apt witness. 
Imagination, therefore, is the enemy of science 
only when it acts without reason, that is, arbi- 
trarily and whimsically ; with.reason, it is often 
the best and the most indispensable of allies. 
Besides, in history, and in the whole region of 
concrete facts, imagination is as necessary as 
in poetry ; the historian, indeed, cannot invent 
his facts, but he must mould them and dispose 
them with a graceful congruity ; and to do this 
is the work of the imagination. Fairy tales 
and fictitious narratives of all kinds, of course, 
have their value, and may be wisely used in the 
culture of the imagination. But by far the 
most useful exercise of this faculty is when it 
buckles itself to realities ; and this I advise 
the student chiefly to cultivate. There is no 
need of going to romances for pictures of hu- 
man character and fortune calculated to please 
the fancy and to elevate the imagination. The 
life of Alexander the Great, of Martin Luther, 
of Gustavus Adolphus, or any of those notable 
characters on the great stage of the world, 
who incarnate the history which they create, 



24 THE CULTURE OF 

is for this purpose of more educational value 
than the best novel that ever was written, or 
even the best poetry. Not all minds delight 
in poetry ; but all minds are impressed and 
elevated by an imposing and a striking fact. 
To exercise the imagination on the lives of 
great and good men brings with it a double 
gain ; for by this exercise we learn at a single 
stroke, and in the most effective way, both 
what was done and what ought to be done. 
But to train the imagination adequately, it is 
not enough that elevating pictures be made to 
float pleasantly before the fancy ; from such 
mere passiveness of mental attitude no strength 
can grow. The student should formally call 
upon his imaginative faculty to take a firm 
grasp of the lovely shadows as they pass, and 
not be content till — closing the gray record 
— he can make the whole storied procession 
pass before him in due order, with appropriate 
badges, attitude, and expression. As there are 
persons who seem to walk through life with 
their eyes open, seeing nothing, so there are 
others who read through books, and perhaps 
even cram themselves with facts, without car- 
rying away any living pictures of significant 
story which might arouse the fancy in an hour 
of leisure, or gird them with endurance in a 
moment of difficulty. Ask yourself, therefore, 



THE INTELLECT. 2$ 

always when you have read a chapter of any 
notable book, not what you saw printed on a 
gray page, but what you see pictured in the 
glowing gallery of your imagination. Have 
your fancy always vivid, and full of body and 
color. Count yourself not to know a fact when 
you know that it took place, but then only when 
you see it as it did take place. 

VII. The word imagination, though denoting 
a faculty which in some degree may be re- 
garded as belonging to every human being, 
seems more particularly connected with that 
class of intellectual perceptions and emotions 
which, for want of a native term, we are accus- 
tomed to call aesthetical. A man may live, and 
live bravely, without much imagination, as a 
house may be well compacted to keep out wind 
and rain, and let in light, and yet be ugly. But 
no one would voluntarily prefer to live in an 
ugly house if he could get a beautiful one. So 
beauty, which is the natural food of a healthy 
imagination, should be sought after by every 
one who wishes to achieve the great end of- 
existence — that is, to make the most of him- 
self. If it is true, as we have just remarked, 
that man liveth not by books alone, it is equally 
true that he liveth not by knowledge alone. 
" It is always good to know something," was 



26 THE CULTURE OF 

the wise utterance of one of the wisest men of 
modern times ; but by this utterance he did 
not mean to assert that mere indiscriminate 
knowing is always good ; what he meant to say 
was that it is wise for a man to pick up care- 
fully, for possible uses, whatever may fall under 
his eye, even though it should not be the best. 
The best, of course, is not always at command ; 
and the bad, on which we frequently stumble, 
is not without its good element, which one 
should not disdain to secure in passing ; but 
what the young man ought to set before him, 
as a worthy object of systematic pursuit, is not 
knowledge in general, or of anything indiffer- 
ently, but knowledge of what is great and beau-, 
tiful and good ; and this, so far as the imagi- 
nation is concerned, can be attained only by 
some special attention paid to the aesthetical 
culture of the intellect. In other words, poe- 
try, painting, music, and the fine arts generally, 
which delight to manifest the sublime and the 
beautiful in every various aspect and attitude, 
fall under the category, not of an accidental 
accomplishment, but of an essential and most 
noble blossom of a cultivated soul. A man who 
knows merely with a keen glance, and acts with 
a firm hand, may do very well for the rough 
work of the world, but he may be a very un- 
gracious and unlovely creature withal ; angular, 



THE INTELLECT. 2/ 

square, dogmatical, persistent, pertinacious, pug- 
nacious, blushless, and perhaps bumptious. To 
bevel down the corners of a character so con- 
stituted by a little aesthetical culture, were a 
work of no small benefit to society, and a source 
of considerable comfort to the creature himself. 
Let a young man, therefore, commence with 
supplying his imaginative faculty with its nat- 
ural food in the shape of beautiful objects of 
every kind. If there is a fine building recently 
erected in the town, let him stand and look at 
it ; if there are fine pictures exhibited, let him 
never be so preoccupied with the avocations of 
his own special business that he cannot afford 
even a passing glance to steal a taste of their 
beauty ; if there are dexterous riders and ex- 
pert tumblers in the circus, let him not imagine 
that their supple somersets are mere idle tricks 
to amuse children ; they are cunning exhibi- 
tions of the wonderful strength and litheness 
of the human limbs, which every wise man 
ought to admire. In general, let the young 
man, ambitious of intellectual excellence, culti- 
vate admiration ; it is by admiration only of 
what is beautiful and sublime that we can mount 
up a few steps towards the likeness of what we 
admire ; and he who wonders not largely and 
habitually, in the midst of this magnificent uni- 
verse, does not prove that the world has nothing 



28 THE CULTURE OF 

great in it worthy of wonder, but only that his 
own sympathies are narrow, and his capacities 
small. The worst thing a young man can do, 
who wishes to educate himself aesthetically, ac- 
cording to the norm of nature, is to begin crit- 
icising, and cultivating the barren graces of the 
nil admtrari. This maxim may be excusable 
in a worn-out old cynic, but is intolerable in 
the mouth of a hopeful young man. There is 
no good to be looked for from a youth who, 
having done no substantial work of his own, 
sets up a business of finding faults in other 
people's work, and calls this practice of finding 
fault criticism. The first lesson that a young 
man has to learn, is not to find fault, but to 
perceive beauties. All criticism worthy of the 
name is the ripe fruit of combined intellectual 
insight and long experience. Only an old sol- 
dier can tell how battles ought to be .fought. 
Young men of course may and ought to have 
opinions on many subjects, but there is no rea- 
son why they should print them. The pub- 
lished opinions of persons whose judgment has 
not been matured by experience can tend only 
to mislead the public, and to debauch the mind 
of the writer. 

I have said that the sublime and the beautiful 
in nature and art are the natural and healthy 
food of the aesthetical faculties. The comical and 



THE INTELLECT. 29 

humorous are useful only in a subsidiary way. 
It is a great loss to a man when he cannot 
laugh ; but a smile is useful specially in enabling 
us lightly to shake off the incongruous, not in 
teaching us to cherish it. Life is an earnest 
business, and no man was ever made great or 
good by a diet of broad grins. The grandest 
humor, such as that of Aristophanes, is valuable 
only as the seasoning of the pudding or the 
spice of the pie. No one feeds on mere pepper 
or vanilla. Let a young man furnish his soul 
richly, like Thorwaldsen's Museum at Copen- 
hagen, with all shapes and forms of excellence, 
from the mild dignity of our Lord and the 
Twelve Apostles to the playful grace of Grecian 
Cupids and Hippocampes ; but let him not deal 
in mere laughter, or corrupt his mind's eye with 
the habitual contemplation of distortion and 
caricature. There is no more sure sign of a 
shallow mind than the habit of seeing always 
the ludicrous side of things ; for the ludicrous, 
as Aristotle remarks, is always on the surface. 
If the humorous novels and sketches of character 
in which this country and this age are so fruitful, 
are taken only as an occasional recreation, like a 
good comedy, they are to be commended ; but 
the practice and study of the Fine Arts offer 
a more healthy variety to severe students than 
the converse with ridiculous sketches of a trifling 



30 THE CULTURE OF 

or contemptible humanity ; and to play a pleas- 
ant tune on the piano, or turn a wise saying of 
some ancient sage into the terms of a terse 
English couplet, will always be a more profitable 
way of unbending from the stern work of pure 
science, than the reading of what are called 
amusing books — an occupation fitted specially 
for the most stagnant moments of life, and the 
most lazy-minded of the living. 

VIII. The next faculty of the mind that 
demands special culture is Memory. It is of 
no use gathering treasures if we cannot store 
them ; it is equally useless to learn what we 
cannot retain in the memory. Happily, of all 
mental faculties this is that one which is most 
certainly improved by exercise ; besides there 
are helps to a weak memory such as do not 
exist for a weak imagination or a weak reason- 
ing power. The most important points to be 
attended to in securing the retention of facts 
once impressed on the imagination, are — (i) 
The distinctness, vividness, and intensity of the 
original impression. Let no man hope to re- 
member what he only vaguely and indistinctly 
apprehends. A multitude of dim and weak im- 
pressions, flowing in upon the mind in a hur- 
ried way, soon vanish in a haze, which veils all 
things, and shows nothing. It is better for the 



THE INTELLECT. 3 1 

memory to have a distinct idea of one fact of a 
great subject, than to have confused ideas of 
the whole. (2) Nothing helps the memory so 
much as order and classification. Classes are 
always few, individuals many ; to know the 
class well is to know what is most essential in 
the character of the individual, and what least 
burdens the memory to retain. (3) The next 
important matter is repetition : if the nail will 
not go in at one stroke, let it have another and 
another. In this domain nothing is denied to 
a dogged pertinacity. A man who finds it 
difficult to remember that Deva is the Sanskrit 
for a God, has only to repeat it seven times a 
day, or seven times a week, and he will not 
forget it. The less tenacious a man's memory 
naturally is, the more determined ought he to 
be to complement it by frequent inculcation. 
Our faculties, like a slow beast, require flogging 
occasionally, or they make no way. (4) Again, 
if memory be weak, causality is perhaps strong ; 
and this point of strength, if wisely used, may 
readily be made to turn an apparent loss into a 
real gain. Persons of very quick memory may 
be apt to rest content with the faculty, and 
exhibit with much applause the dexterity only 
of an intellectual parrot ; but the man who is 
slow to remember without a reason, searches 
after the casual connection of the facts, and, 



32 THE CULTURE OF 

when he has found it, binds together by the bond 
of rational sequences what the constitution 
of his mind disinclined him to receive as an 
arbitrary and unexplained succession. (5) Arti- 
ficial bonds of association may also sometimes 
be found useful, as when a schoolboy remembers 
that Abydos is on the Asiatic coast of the 
Hellespont, because both Asia and Abydos 
commence with the letter A ; but such tricks 
suit rather the necessities of an ill-trained 
governess than the uses of a manly mind. I 
have no faith in the systematic use of what are 
called artificial mnemonic systems ; they fill the 
fancy with a set of arbitrary and ridiculous 
symbols which interfere with the natural play 
of the faculties. Dates in history, to which this 
sort of machinery has been generally applied, 
are better recollected by the causal dependence, 
or even the accidental contiguity of great names, 
as when I recollect that Plato was twenty-nine 
years old when Socrates drank the hemlock ; 
and that Aristotle, the pupil of this Plato, was 
himself the tutor of that famous son of Philip 
.of Macedon, who with his conquering hosts 
caused the language of Socrates and Plato to 
shake hands with the sacred dialect of the 
Brahmanic hymns on the banks of the Indus. 
(6) Lastly, whatever facilities of memory a man 
may possess, let him not despise the sure aids 



THE INTELLECT. 



33 



so amply supplied by written record. To speak 
from a paper certainly does not strengthen, but 
has rather a tendency to enfeeble the memory ; 
but to retain stores of readily available matter, 
in the shape of written or printed record, enables 
a man to command a vast amount of accumu- 
lated materials, at whatever moment he may 
require them. In this view the young student 
cannot begin too early the practice of inter- 
leaving certain books, and making a good index 
to others, or in some such fashion tabulating 
his knowledge for apt and easy reference. Our 
preachers would certainly much increase the 
value of their weekly discourses if they would 
keep interleaved Bibles and insert at apposite 
and striking texts such facts in life, or anecdotes 
from books, as might tend to their illustration. 
They might thus, even with a very weak natural 
memory, learn to bring forth from their treasury 
things new and old, with a wealth of practical 
application in those parts of their spiritual 
addresses which are at present generally the 
most meagre and the most vague. By political 
students Aristotle's " Politics " might be ben- 
eficially interleaved in the same way, and the 
mind thus preserved from that rigidity and one- 
sidedness which a familiarity with only the 
most modern and recent experience of public 
life is so apt to engender. 
3 



34 THE CULTURE OF 

IX. A most important matter, not seldom 
neglected in the scholastic and academical 
training of young men, is the art of polished, 
pleasant, and effective expression. I shall 
therefore offer a few remarks here on the for- 
mation of Style, and on Public Speaking. 
Man is naturally a speaking animal ; and a 
good style is merely that accomplishment in 
the art of verbal expression which arises from 
the improvement of the natural faculty by good 
training. The best training for the formation 
of style is of course familiar intercourse with 
good speakers and writers. A man's vocabu- 
lary depends very much always, and in the 
first stages perhaps altogether, on the company 
he keeps. Read, therefore, the best composi- 
tions of the most lofty-minded and eloquent 
men, and you will not fail to catch something 
of their nobility, only let there be no slavish 
imitation of any man's manner of expression. 
There is a certain individuality about every 
man's style, as about his features, which must 
be preserved. Also, be not over anxious about 
mere style, as if it were a thing that could be 
cultivated independently of ideas. Be more 
careful that you should have something weighty 
and pertinent to say, than that you should say 
things in the most polished and skillful way. 
There is good sense in what Socrates said to 



THE INTELLECT. 35 

the clever young Greeks in this regard, that if 
they had something to say they would know 
how to say it ; and to the same effect spoke 
St. Paul to the early Corinthian Christians, 
and in these last times the wise Goethe to the 
German students, — 

" Be thine to seek the honest gain, 

No shallow-sounding fool ; 
Sound sense finds utterance for itself, 

Without the critic's rule ; 
If to your heart your tongue be true, 
Why hunt for words with much ado ? " 

But with this reservation you cannot be too 
diligent in acquiring the habit of expressing 
your thoughts on paper with that combination 
of lucid order, graceful ease, pregnant signifi- 
cance, and rich variety, which marks a good 
style. But for well-educated men, in this 
country at least, and for normally-constituted 
men in all countries I should say, writing is 
only a step to speaking. Not only professional 
men, such as preachers, advocates, and poli- 
ticians, but almost every man in a free country, 
may be called upon occasionally to express his 
sentiments in public ; and unless the habit be 
acquired early, in later years there is apt to 
be felt a certain awkwardness and difficulty 
in the public utterance of thought, which is 
not the less real because it is in most cases 
artificial. The great thing here is to begin 



36 THE CULTURE OF 

early, and to avoid that slavery of the paper, 
which, as Plato foresaw, 1 makes so many cul- 
tivated men in these days less natural, in their 
speech, and x less eloquent, than the most un- 
tutored savages. Young men should train 
themselves to marshal their ideas in good 
order, and to keep a firm grip of them without 
the help of paper. A card, with a few leading 
words to catch the eye, may help the memory 
in the first place ; but it is better, as often as 
possible, to dispense with even this assistance. 
A speaker should always look his audience 
directly in the face, which he cannot do when 
he is obliged to cast a side glance into a paper. 
In order to acquire early this useful habit, I 
need scarcely say that there is no better train- 
ing school than the debating societies which 
have long been a strong point of the Scottish 
universities. Practice will produce dexterity ; 
dexterity will work confidence ; and the bash- 
fulness and timidity so natural to a young man 
when first called upon to address a public 
meeting, so far as it lames and palsies his 
utterance, will disappear ; that it should dis- 
appear altogether is far from necessary. For- 
wardness and pertness are a much more 
serious fault in a young speaker than a little 
nervous bashfulness. A public speaker should 

1 See the PJuedrus. 



THE INTELLECT. 37 

never wish to shake himself free from that 

• 

feeling of responsibility which belongs to his 
position as one whose words are meant to 
influence, and ought to influence, the senti- 
ments of all ranks of his fellow beings ; but 
that this feeling of reverential respect for the 
virtue of the spoken word may not degenerate 
into a morbid anxiety, and a pale concern for 
tame propriety, I would advise him not to 
think of himself at all, but to go to the pulpit 
or platform with a thorough command of his 
subject, with an earnest desire to do some 
good by his talk, and to trust to God for the 
utterance. Of course this does not imply that 
in respect of distinct and effective utterance 
a man has nothing to learn from a professed 
master of elocution ; it is only meant that 
mere intelligible speaking is a natural thing, 
about which no special anxiety is to be felt. 
Accomplished speaking, like marching or dan- 
cing, is an art, for the exercise of which, in 
many cases, a special training is necessary. 

X. I said under the first head that the foun- 
tains of true wisdom are not books ; neverthe- 
less, in the present stage of society, books play, 
and must continue to play, a great part in the 
training of young minds ; and therefore I shall 
here set down some points in detail with regard 



38 THE CULTURE OF 

to the choice, and the use of Books. Keep in 
mind, in the first place, that though the library 
shelves groan with books, whose name is legion, 
there are in each department only a few great 
books, in relation to which others are but aux- 
iliary, or it may be sometimes parasitical, and,_ 
like the ivy, doing harm rather than good to 
the bole round which they cling. How many 
thousands, for instance, and tens of thousands, 
of books on Christian theology have been writ- 
ten and published in the world since the first 
preaching of the Gospel, which, of course con- 
tain nothing more and nothing better than the 
Gospel itself, and which, if they were all burnt 
to-morrow, would leave Christianity in the 
main, nothing the worse, and in some points 
essentially the better. There is fully as much 
nonsense as sense in many learned books that 
have made a noise in their day ; and in most 
books there is a great deal of superfluous and 
useless talk. Stick therefore to the great books, 
the original books, the fountain-heads of great 
ideas and noble passions, and you will learn 
joyfully to dispense with the volumes of acces- 
sory talk by. which their virtue has been as fre- 
quently obscured as illuminated. For a young 
theologian it is of far greater importance that 
he- should have the Greek New Testament by 
heart than that he should be able to talk glibly 



THE INTELLECT. 39 

about the last volume of sermons by Dr. Kerr 
or Stopford Brooke. All these are very well, 
but they are not the one thing needful ; for the 
highest Christian culture they may lightly be 
dispensed with. Not so the Bible. Fix there- 
fore in your eye the great books on which the 
history of human thought and the changes of 
human fortunes have turned. In politics look 
to Aristotle; in mathematics to Newton; in 
philosophy to Leibnitz ; in theology to Cud- 
worth ; in poetry to Shakspeare ; in science to 
Faraday. Cast a firm glance also on those 
notable men, who, though not achieving any 
valuable positive results of speculation, were 
useful in their day, as protesting against wide- 
spread popular error, and rousing people into 
trains of more consistent thinking and acting. 
To this class of men belonged Voltaire amongst 
the French, and David Hume in our country. 
But, of course, while you covet earnestly a 
familiar acquaintance with all such original 
thinkers and discoverers in the world of thought 
and action, you will feel only too painfully that 
you cannot always lay hold of them in the first 
stage of your studies ; you will require steps to 
mount up to shake hands with these Celestials ; 
and these steps are little books. Do not there- 
fore despise little books ; they are for you the 
necessary lines of approach to the great fortress 



40 THE CULTURE OF 

of knowledge, and cannot safely be overleapt. 
On the contrary, take a little grammar, for in- 
stance, when learning a language, rather than 
a big one ; and learn the fundamental things, 
the anatomy, the bones and solid framework, 
with strict accuracy, before plunging into the 
complex tissue of the living physiology. This 
may appear harsh at first, but will save you 
trouble afterwards. But, while you learn your 
little book thoroughly, you must beware of 
reading it by the method of mere Cram. Some 
things, no doubt, there are that must be appro- 
priated by the process of cram ; but these are 
not the best things, and they contain no culture. 
Cram is a mere mechanical operation, of which 
a reasoning animal should be ashamed. But 
cramming, however often ^practised, is seldom 
necessary ; it is resorted to by those specially 
who cannot, or who will not, learn to think. I 
advise you, on the contrary, whenever possible, 
to think before you read, or at least while you 
are reading. If you can find out for yourself 
by a little puzzling why the three angles of a 
triangle not only are, but, in the very nature of 
the thing must be, equal to two right * angles, 
you will have done more good to your reason- 
ing powers than if you had got the demonstra- 
tions of the whole twelve books of Euclid by 
heart according to the method of cram. The 



THE INTELLECT. 41 

next advice I give you with regard to books is 
that you should read as much as possible sys- 
tematically and chronologically. Without order 
things will not hang together in the mind, and 
the most natural and instructive order is the 
order of genesis and growth. Read Plutarch's 
great Lives, for instance, from Theseus down 
to Cleomenes and Aratus, in chronological se- 
quence, and you will have a much more vital 
sort of Greek history in your memory than 
either Thirl wall or Grote can supply. But of 
course neither this nor any other rule can be 
applied in all cases without exception. The ex- 
ception to systematic reading is made by pre- 
dilection. If you feel a strong natural tendency 
towards acquainting yourself with any particu- 
lar period of history, by all means make that 
acquaintance ; only do it accurately and thor- 
oughly. One link in the chain firmly laid hold 
of, will by and by through natural connec- 
tion lead to others. As you advance from fa- 
vorite point to point, you will find the neces- 
sity of binding them together by some strict 
chronological sequence. For general informa- 
tion a sort of random reading may be allowed 
occasionally ; but this sort of thing has to do 
only with the necessary recreation or the useful 
furnishing of the mind, and is utterly destitute 
of training virtue ; and such reading, to which 



42 THE CULTURE OF 

there is great temptation in these times, is 
rather prejudicial than advantageous to the 
mind. The great scholars of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries had not so many books 
as we have, but what they had they made a 
grand use of. Reading, in the case of mere 
miscellaneous readers, is like the racing of some 
little dog about the moor, snuffing everything 
and catching nothing ; but a reader of the right 
sort finds his prototype in Jacob, who wrestled 
with an ^ angel all night, and counted himself 
the better for the bout, though the sinew of his 
thigh shrank in consequence. 

XI. A few remarks may be useful on strictly 
Professional Reading, as opposed to reading 
with the view of general culture. There is a 
natural eagerness among young men to com- 
mence without delay their special professional 
work — what the Germans very significantly 
call Brodstudien ; but there cannot be a doubt 
that in the unqualified way that young men 
take up this notion, it is a great mistake, as the 
experience of professional men and the history 
of professional eminence has largely proved. 
For, in the first place, a little reflection will 
teach a thoughtful youth, that what in his 
present stage he may be disposed to regard 
as useless ornaments, or even incumbrances, 



THE INTELLECT. 43 

are often the most valuable aids and Ihe most 
serviceable tools to his future professional ac- 
tivity. This is peculiarly the case with lan- 
guages, which seem in the first place to stand 
in the way of a firm grasp of things, but which 
become more necessary to a man the more he 
extends the range and fastens the roots of his 
professional knowledge. If languages have been 
often overvalued, it is only when they have been 
looked on as an end in themselves. Their value 
as tools, in the hands of an intelligent thinker, 
can scarcely be overrated. Again, the merely 
professional man is always a narrow man ; worse 
than that, he is in a sense an artificial man, a 
creature of technicalities and specialties, . re- 
moved equally from the broad truth of nature 
and from the healthy influence of human con- 
verse. In society the most accomplished man 
of mere professional skill is often a nullity ; he 
has sunk his humanity in his dexterity ; he is a 
leather-dealer, and can talk only about leather ; 
a student, and smells fustily of books, as an in- 
veterate smoker does of tobacco. So far from 
rushing hastily into merely professional studies, 
a young man should rather be anxious to avoid 
the engrossing influence of what is popularly 
called Shop. He will soon enough learn to 
know the cramping influence of purely profes- 



44 THE CULTURE OE 

sional occupation. Let him flap his wings lus- 
tily in an ampler region while he may ; 

" Der Jiingling soil die Flugel regen 
In Lieb und Hass gewaltig sich bewegen."' 

But if a man will fix his mind on merely pro- 
fessional study, and can find no room for gen- 
eral culture in his soul, let him be told that 
no professional studies, however complete, can 
teach a man the whole of his profession ; that 
the most exact professional drill will omit to 
teach him the most interesting and the most 
important part of his own business — that part, 
namely, where the specialty of the profession 
comes directly into contact with the generality 
of human notions and human sympathies. Of 
this the profession of the law furnishes an ex- 
cellent example : for, while there is no art more 
technical, more artificial, and more removed 
from a fellow-feeling of humanity, than law in 
many of its branches, in others it marches out 
into the- grand arena of human rights and lib- 
erties, and deals with large questions, in the 
handling of which it is often of more conse- 
quence that a pleader should be a complete 
man than that he should be an expert lawyer. 
In the same Way, medicine has as much to do 
with a knowledge of human nature and of the 
human soul as with the virtues of cunningly 
mingled drugs, and the revelations of a techni- 



THE INTELLECT. 45 

cal diagnosis ; and theology is generally then 
least human and least evangelical when it is 
most stifly orthodox and most nicely profes- 
sional. Universal experience, accordingly, has 
proved that the general scholar, however ap- 
parently inferior at the first start, will, in the 
long run, beat the special man on his own fa- 
vorite ground ; for the special man, from the 
small field of his habitual survey, can neither 
know the principles on which his practice rests, 
nor the relation of his own particular art to 
general human interests and general human 
intelligence. The best preservatives against 
the cramping force of merely professional study 
are to be found in the healthy influences of so- 
ciety, in travel, and in cultivating a familiarity 
with the great writers — specially poets and 
historians — whose purely human thoughts 
" make rich the blood of the world," and en- 
large the platform of sympathetic intelligence. 

XII. I will conclude this chapter of intel- 
lectual culture with some remarks on a subject 
with regard to which, considering my profes- 
sional position, people will naturally be inclined 
to expect, and willing to receive advice from me 
— I mean the study of Languages. The short 
rules which I will set down in what appears to 
me their order of natural succession, are the 



4.6 THE CULTURE OF 

result of many years' experience, and may be 
relied on as being of a strictly practical char- 
acter. 

(i.) If possible always start with a good 
teacher. He will save you much time by clear- 
ing away difficulties that might otherwise dis- 
courage you, and preventing the formation of 
bad 'habits of enunciation, which must after- 
wards be unlearned. 

(2.) The next step is to name aloud, in the 
language to be learned, every object which 
meets your eye, carefully excluding the inter- 
vention of the English : in other words, think 
and speak of the objects about you in the lan- 
guage you are learning from the very first hour 
of your teaching ; and remember that the lan- 
guage belongs in the first place to your ear and 
to your tongue, not to your book merely and to 
your brain. 

(3.) Commit to memory the simplest and 
most normal forms of the declension of nouns, 
such as the us and a declension in Latin, and 
the a declension in Sanskrit. 

(4.) The moment you have learned the nom- 
inative and accusative cases of these nouns take 
the first person of the present indicative of any 
common verb, and pronounce aloud some short 
sentence according to the rules of syntax be- 
longing to active verbs, as — opw rbv "HAioj/, I see 
the sun. 



THE INTELLECT. 47 

(5.) Enlarge this practice by adding some 
epithet to the substantive, declined according to 
the same noun, as — op<x> tov Xajx-npov *HAiov, / see 
the bright sun. 

(6.) Go on in this manner progressively, 
committing to memory the whole present in- 
dicative, past and future indicative, of simple 
verbs, always making short sentences with 
them, and some appropriate nouns, and al- 
ways thinking directly in the foreign language, 
excluding the intrusion of the English. In this 
essential element of every rational system of 
linguistic training there is no real, but only an 
imaginary difficulty to contend with, and, in 
too many cases, the pertinacity of a perverse 
practice. 

(7.) When the ear and tongue have acquired 
a fluent mastery of the simpler forms of nouns, 
verbs, and sentences, then, but riot till then, 
should the scholar be led, by a graduated proc- 
ess, to the more difficult and complex forms. 

(8.) Let nothing be learned from rules that 
is not immediately illustrated by practice ; or 
rather, let the rules be educed from the prac- 
tice of ear and tongue, and let them be as few 
and as comprehensive as possible. 

(9.) Irregularities of various kinds are best 
learned by practice as they occur ; but some 
anomalies, as in the conjugation of a few irreg- 



48 THE CULTURE OF 

ular verbs, are of such frequent occurrence, and 
are so necessary for progress, that they had 
better be learned specially by heart as soon as 
possible. Of this the verb to be, in almost all 
languages, is a familiar example. 

(10.) Let some easy narrative be read, in the 
first place, or better, some familiar dialogue, as, 
in Greek, Xenophon's Anabasis and Memora- 
bilia, Cebetis Tabula, and Lucian's Dialogues ; 
but reading must never be allowed, as is so 
generally the case, to be practiced as a substi- 
tute for thinking and speaking. To counteract 
this tendency, the best way is to take objects 
of natural history, or representations of inter- 
esting objects, and describe their parts aloud 
in simple sentences, without the intervention 
of the mother tongue. 

(n.) Let all exercises of reading and de- 
scribing be repeated again and again and 
again. No book fit to be read in the early 
stages of language-learning should be read only, 
once. 

(12.) Let your reading, if possible, be always 
in sympathy with your intellectual appetite. 
Let the matter of the work be interesting, and 
you will make double progress. To know some- 
thing of the subject beforehand will be an im- 
mense help. For this reason, with Christians 
who know the Scriptures, as we do in Scotland, 



THE INTELLECT. 49 

a translation of the Bible is always one of the 
best books to use in the acquisition of a foreign 
tongue. 

(13.) As you read, note carefully the differ- 
ence between the idioms of the strange lan- 
guage and those of the mother tongue ; under- 
score these distinctly with pen or pencil, in 
some thoroughly idiomatic translation, and after 
a few days translate back into the original 
tongue what you have before you in the Eng- 
lish form. 

(14.) To methodize, and, if necessary, cor- 
rect your observations, consult some systematic 
grammar so long as you may find it profitable. 
But the grammar should, as much as possible, 
follow the practice, not precede it. 

(15.) Be not content with that mere method- 
ical generalization of the practice which you 
find in many grammars, but endeavor always to 
find the principle of the rule, whether belong- 
ing to universal or special grammar. 

(16.) Study the theory of language, the or- 
ganism of speech, and what is called com- 
parative philology or Glossology. The princi- 
ples there revealed will enable you to prosecute 
with a reasoning intelligence a study which 
would otherwise be in a great measure a la- 
borious exercise of arbitrary memory. 

(17.) Still, practice is the main thing; lan- 
4 



50 THE CULTURE OF 

guage must, in the first place, be familiar ; and 
this familiarity can be attained only by constant 
reading and constant conversation. Where a 
man has no person to speak to he may declaim 
to himself; but the ear and the tongue must 
be trained, not the eye merely and the under- 
standing. In reading, a man must not confine 
himself to standard works. He must devour 
everything greedily that he can lay his hands 
on. He must not merely get up a book jvith 
accurate precision ; that is all very well as a 
special task ; but he must learn to live largely 
in the general element of the language ; and 
minute accuracy in details is not to be sought 
before a fluent practical command of the gen- 
eral currency of the language has been at- 
tained. Shakespeare, for instance, ought to be 
read twenty times before a man begins to oc- 
cupy himself with the various readings of the 
Shakesperian text, or the ingenious conjectures 
of his critics. 

(18.) Composition, properly so called, is. the 
culmination of the exercises of speaking and 
reading, translation and re-translation, which 
we have sketched. In this exercise the essen- 
tial thing is to write from a model, not from 
dictionaries or phrase-books. Choose an au- 
thor who is a pattern of a particular style — say 
Plato in philosophical dialogue, or Lucian in 



THE INTELLECT. 51 

playful colloquy — steal his phrases, and do 
something of the same kind yourself, directly, 
without the intervention of the English. After 
you have acquired fluency in this way you may 
venture to put more of yourself into the style, 
and learn to write the foreign tongue as grace- 
fully as Latin was written by Erasmus, Wytten- 
bach, or Ruhnken. Translation from English 
classics may also be practiced, but not in the 
first place ; the ear must be tuned by direct 
imitation of the foreign tongue, before the more 
difficult art of transference from the mother 
tongue can be attempted with success, 




ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 



"The glory of a young man is his strength." 

Solomon. 




ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 



I. It is a patent fact, as certain as anything 
in mathematics, that whatever exists must 
have a basis on which to stand, a root from 
which to grow, a hinge on which to turn, a 
something which, however subordinate in it- 
self with reference to the complete whole, is 
the indispensable point of attachment from 
which the existence of the whole depends. No 
house can be raised except on a foundation, a 
substructure which has no independent virtue, 
and which, when it exists in the greatest per- 
fection, is generally not visible, but rather 
loves to hide itself in darkness. Now this is 
exactly the sort of relation which subsists be- 
tween a man's thinking faculty and his body, 
between his mental activity and his bodily 
health ; and it is obvious that, if this analogy 
be true, there is nothing that a student ought 
to be more careful about than the sound con- 
dition of his flesh and blood. It is, however, 
a well-known fact that the care of their health, 



56 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

or, what is the same thing, the rational treat- 
ment of their own flesh and blood, is the very 
last thing that students seriously think of ; and 
the more eager the student, the more apt is 
he to sin in this respect, and to drive himself, 
like an unsignaled railway train, to the very 
brink of a fatal precipice, before he knows 
where he stands. It is wise, therefore, to start 
in a studious life with the assured conviction 
which all experience warrants, that sedentary 
occupations generally, and specially sedentary 
habits combined with severe and persistent 
brain exercise, are more or less unhealthy, and, 
in the case of naturally frail constitutions, such 
as have frequently a tendency to fling them- 
selves into books, tend directly to the enfee- 
bling of the faculties and the undermining of 
the frame. After this warning from an old 
student, let every man consider that his blood 
shall be on his own head if he neglect to use, 
with a firm purpose, as much care in the pres- 
ervation of his health as any good workman 
would do in keeping his tools sharp, or any 
good soldier in having his powder dry. Mean- 
while I will jot down, under a few heads, some 
of the most important practical suggestions 
with which experience has furnished me in 
this matter. 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 57 

II. The growth and vigorous condition of 
every member of the body, as, in fact, of every 
function of existence in the universe, depends 
on Exercise. All life is an energizing or a 
working ; absolute rest is found . only in the 
grave ; and the measure of a man's vitality is 
the measure of his working power. To pos- 
sess every faculty and function of the body in 
harmonious working order is to be healthy ; to 
be healthy, with a high degree of vital force, 
is to be strong. A man may be healthy with- 
out being strong ; but all health tends, more 
or less, towards strength, and all disease is 
weakness. Now, any one may see in nature, 
that things grow big simply by growing ; this 
growth is a constant and habitual exercise of 
vital or vegetative force, and whatever checks 
or diminishes the action of this force — say, 
harsh winds or frost — will stop the growth 
and stunt the production. Let the student 
therefore bear in mind, that sitting on a chair, 
leaning over a desk, poring over a book, can- 
not possibly be the way to make his body 
grow. The blood can be made to flow, and 
the muscles to play freely, only by exercise ; 
and, if that exercise is not taken, Nature will 
not be mocked. Every young student ought 
to make a sacred resolution to move about in 
the open air at least two hours every day. If 



58 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

he does not do this, cold feet, the clogging of 
the wheels of the internal parts of the fleshly 
frame, and various shades of stomachic and 
cerebral discomfort, will .not fail in due season 
to inform him that he has been sinning against 
Nature, and, if he does not amend his courses, 
as a bad boy he will certainly be flogged ; for 
Nature is never, like some soft-hearted human 
masters, over merciful in her treatment. But 
why shoul a student indulge so much in the 
lazy and unhealthy habit of sitting ? A man 
may think as well standing as sitting, often 
not a little better ; and as for reading in these 
days, when the most weighty books may be 
had cheaply, in the lightest form, there is no 
necessity why a person should be bending his 
back, and doubling his chest, merely because 
he happens to have a book in his hand. A 
man will read a play or a poem far more natu- 
rally and effectively while walking up and 
down the room, than when sitting sleepily in 
a chair. Sitting, in fact, is a slovenly habit, 
and ought not to be indulged. But when a 
man does sit, or must sit, let him at all events 
sit erect, with his back to the light, and a full 
free projection of the breast. Also, when 
studying languages, or reading fine passages 
of poetry, let him read as much as possible 
aloud ; a practice recommended by Clemens 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 59 

of Alexandria, 1 and which will have the double 
good effect of strengthening that most im- 
portant vital element the lungs, and training 
the ear to the perception of vocal distinct- 
ions, so stupidly neglected in many of our 
public schools. There is, in fact, no necessary 
connection, in most cases, between the knowl- 
edge which a student is anxious to acquire, 
and the sedentary habits which students are 
so apt to cultivate. A certain part of his 
work, no doubt, must be done amid books ; 
but if I wish to know Homer, for instance, 
thoroughly, after the first grammatical and 
lexicographical drudgery is over, I can read 
him as well on the top of Ben Cruachan, or, 
if the day be blasty, amid the grand silver 
pines at Inverawe, as in a fusty study. A 
man's enjoyment of an ^Eschylean drama or 
a Platonic dialogue will not be diminished, 
but sensibly increased, by the fragrant breath 
of birches blowing around him, or the sound 
of mighty waters rushing near. As for a lexi- 
con, if you make yourself at the first reading 
a short index of the more difficult words, you 
can manage the second reading more comfort- 
ably without it. What a student should spe- 
cially see to, both in respect of health and of 

1 iroWois 5e e<r0' otc koX rb yeyoovbv 
ttjs avayvcacrectis yv^vaaiov icrriv. — Pcedagog. iii. IO. 



60 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

good taste, is not to carry the breath of books 
with him wherever he goes, as some people 
carry the odor of tobacco. To prevent this 
contagion of bookishness, the best thing a 
young man can do is to join a volunteer corps, 
the drill connected with which will serve the 
double purpose of brushing off all taint of 
pedantry, and girding the loins stoutly for all 
the duties that belong to citizenship and ac- 
tive manhood. The modern Prussians, like 
the ancient Greeks, understand the value of 
military drill, and make every man serve kis 
time in the army ; but we rush prematurely 
into the shop, and our citizenship and our 
manhood suffer accordingly. The cheapness 
of railway and steamboat travelling, also, in 
the present day, renders inexcusable the con- 
duct of the studious youth who will sit, week 
after week, and month after month, chained 
to a dull gray book, when he might inhale 
much more healthy imaginings from the vivid 
face of nature in some green glen or remote 
wave-plashed isle. A book, of course, may 
always be in his pocket, if a book be neces- 
sary ; but it is better to cultivate independence 
of these paper helps, as often as may be, to 
learn directly from observation of nature, and 
to sit in a frame of " wise passiveness," grow- 
ing insensibly in strong thought and feeling, 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 6 1 

by the breezy influences of Nature playing 
about us. But it is not necessary that a man 
should be given to indulge in Wordsworthian 
musings, before the modern habits of travel- 
ling and touring can be made to subserve the 
double end of health and culture. Geology, 
Botany, Zoology, and all branches of Natural 
History, are best studied in the open air ; and 
their successful cultivation necessarily implies 
the practice of those habits of active and en- 
terprising pedestrianism, which are such a fine 
school of independent manhood. History also 
and archaeology are most aptly studied in the 
storied glen, the ruined abbey, or the stout old 
border tower ; and in fact, in an age when the 
whole world is more or less locomotive, the 
student who stays at home, and learns in a 
gray way only from books, in addition to the 
prospect of dragging through life with enfee- 
bled health, and dropping into a premature 
grave, must rnake up his mind to be looked 
on by all well-conditioned persons as a weak- 
ling and an oddity. 

For keeping the machine of the body in a 
fine poise of flexibility and firmness, nothing 
deserves a higher place than Games and Gym- 
nastics. A regular constitutional walk, as it 
is called, before dinner, as practiced by many 
persons, has no doubt something formal about 



52 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

it, which not everybody knows to season with 
pleasantness : to those who feel the pressure of 
such formality, athletic games supply the nec- 
essary exercise along with a healthy social 
stimulus. For boys and young men, cricket ; 
for persons of a quiet temperament, and staid 
old bachelors, bowls ; for all persons and all 
ages, the breezy Scottish game of golf is to 
be commended. Boating of course, when not 
overdone, as it sometimes is in Oxford and 
Cambridge, is a manly and characteristically 
British exercise ; and the delicate management 
of sail and rudder as practiced in the Shetland 
and Hebridean seas, is an art which calls into 
play all the powers that belong to a prompt 
and vigorous manhood. Angling, again, is 
favorable to musing and poetic imaginings, as 
the examples of Walton and Stoddart, and 
glorious John Wilson, largely show ; in rainy 
weather billiards is out of sight the best game ; 
in it there is developed a quickness of eye, an 
expertness of touch, and a subtlety of calcu- 
lation, truly admirable. In comparison with 
this cards are stupid, which, at best, in whist, 
only exercise the memory, while chess can 
scarcely be called an amusement ; it is a study, 
and a severe brain- exercise, which for a man 
of desultory mental activity may have a brac- 
ing virtue, but to a systematic • thinker can 
scarcely act as a relief. 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 63 

III. Let me now make a few remarks on 
the very vulgar, but by no means always wisely 
managed process of Eating and Drinking. 
Abernethy was wont to say that the two great 
killing powers in the world are Stuff and 
Fret. Of these the former certainly has noth- 
ing to do with the premature decay of Scot- 
tish students ; they die rather of eating too 
little than of eating too much. Of course it is 
necessary, in the first place, that you should 
have something to eat, and, in the second place, 
that what you eat should be substantial and 
nourishing. With regard to the details of this 
matter you must consult the doctor ; but I 
believe it is universally agreed that the plainest 
food is often the best ; and for the highest 
cerebral and sanguineous purposes, long ex- 
perience has proved that there is nothing better 
than oatmeal and good pottage. For as the 
poet says — 

" Buirdly chiels and clever hizzies 
Are bred in sic a way as this is." 

Supposing, however, that the supply of good 
nourishment is adequate, people are apt to err 
in various ways when they come to use it. 
There is a class of people who do not walk 
through life, but race ; they do not know what 
it is to sit down to anything with a quiet pur- 
pose, and so they bolt their dinner with a gal- 



64 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

loping purpose to be done with it as soon as 
possible. This is bad policy and bad philoso- 
phy. The man who eats in a hurry loses both 
the pleasure of eating and the profit of diges- 
tion. If men of business in bustling cities, 
and Americans who live in a constant fever of 
democratic excitement, are apt to indulge in 
this unhealthy habit, students and bookish men 
are not free from the same temptation. Eager 
readers will not only bolt their dinner that they 
may get to their books, but they will read some- 
times even while they are eating ; thus forcing 
nature to act from two distinct vital centres at 
the same time — the brain and the stomach — 
of which the necessary result is to enfeeble 
both. To sip a cup of tea with Lucian or 
Aristophanes in one hand may be both pleasant 
and profitable ; but dinner is a more serious 
affair, and must be gone about with a devotion 
of the whole man — totus in illis, " a whole 
man to one thing at one time," as Chancellor 
Thurlow said, — seasoned very properly, with 
agreeable conversation or a little cheerful music, 
where you can have it, but never mingled with 
severe cogitations or perplexing problems. In 
this view the custom of the English and Ger- 
man students of dining with one another, is 
much to be commended before the solitary 
feeding too often practiced by poor Scottish 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 6$ 

students in lonely lodging houses. In this 
matter the Free Church of Scotland, among 
its other notable achievements, has recently- 
shown us an example well worthy of imitation. 
They have instituted a dining hall for their 
theological students, distinguished by salubrity, 
cheapness, and sociality. Next to quality, a 
certain variety of food is by all means to be 
sought after. The stimulus of novelty that 
goes along with variety, sharpens appetite ; 
besides that Nature, in all her rich and beau- 
tiful ways, emphatically protests against mo- 
notony. It is, moreover, a point of practical 
wisdom to prevent the stomach from becoming 
the habituated slave of any kind of food. In 
change of circumstances the favorite diet can- 
not always be had ; and so, to keep himself in 
a state of alimentary comfort, your methodical 
eater must restrict his habits of locomotion, 
and narrow the range of his existence to a 
fixed sphere where he can be fed regularly with 
his meted portion. As for drink, I need not 
say that a glass of good beer or wine is always 
pleasant, and in certain cases may even be 
necessary to stimulate digestion ; but healthy 
young men can never require such stimulus ; 
and the more money that a poor Scotch stu- 
dent can spare from unnecessary and slippery 
luxuries, such as drink and tobacco, so much 
5 



66 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

the better. " Honest water " certainly has this 
merit, that it " never made any man a sinner ; " 
and of whisky it may be said that, however 
beneficial it may be on a wet moor or on 
the top of a frosty Ben in the Highlands, when 
indulged in habitually it never made any man 
either fair or fat. He who abstains from it 
altogether will never die in a ditch, and will 
always find a penny in his pocket to help him- 
self and his friend in an emergency. 

IV. I believe there are few things more 
necessary than to warn students against the 
evil effects of close rooms and bad ventilation. 
Impure air can never make pure blood ; and 
impure blood corrupts the whole system. But 
the evil is, that, no immediate sensible effects 
being produced from a considerable amount 
of impurity in the air, thoughtless and careless 
persons — that is, I am afraid, the great majority 
of persons — go on inhaling it without receiv- 
ing any hint that they are imbibing poison. 
But those evils are always the most dangerous 
of which the approaches are the most insidious. 
Let students, therefore, who are often confined 
in small rooms, be careful to throw open their 
windows whenever they go out ; and, if the 
windows of their sleeping-room are so situated 
that they can be kept open without sending a 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 6/ 

draught of air directly across the sleeper, let 
them by all means be left open night and day, 
both summer and winter. In breezy Scotland 
at least, this practice, except in the case of 
very sensitive subjects, can only be beneficial. 
In hot countries, where insalubrious vapors 
in some places infest the night, it may be 
otherwise. 

V. Should it be necessary to say a word 
about Sleep ? One would think not. Nature, 
we may imagine, is sufficient for herself in this 
matter. Let a man sleep when he is sleepy, and 
rise when the crow of the cock, or the glare of 
the sun, rouses him from his torpor. Exactly 
so, if Nature always got fair play ; but she is 
swindled and flouted in so many ways by human 
beings, that a general reference to her often 
becomes a useless generality. In the matter of 
sleep specially students are great sinners ; nay, 
their very profession is a sin against repose ; 
and the strictest prophylactic measures are 
necessary to prevent certain poaching practices 
of thinking men into the sacred domain of 
sleep. Cerebral excitement, like strong coffee, 
is the direct antagonist of sleep ; therefore the 
student should so apportion his hours of intel- 
lectual task-work, that the more exciting and 
stimulating brain exercise should never be con- 



68 OAT PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

tinued direct into the hour for repose ; but let 
the last work of the day be always something 
comparatively light and easy, or dull and so- 
porific ; or better still, let a man walk for an 
hour before bed, or have a pleasant chat with a 
chum, and then there can be no fear but that 
Nature, left to herself, will find, without artifice, 
the measure of rest which she requires. As to 
the exact amount of that measure no rule can 
be laid down ; less than six, or more than eight 
hours' sleep, according to general experience, 
must always be exceptional. The student who 
walks at least two hours every day, and works 
hard with his brain eight or nine hours besides, 
will soon find out what is the natural measure 
of sleep that he requires to keep free from the 
feverishness and the languor that are the neces- 
sary consequences of prolonged artificial wake- 
fulness. As to early rising, which makes such 
a famous figure in some notable biographies, I 
can say little about it, as it is a virtue which 
I was never able to practice. There can be no 
doubt, however, that, wherever it can be prac- 
ticed in a natural and easy way, it is a very 
healthful practice ; and in certain circumstances, 
such as those in which the late distinguished 
Baron Bunsen was placed, full of various busi- 
ness and distraction, the morning hours seem 
clearly to be pointed out as the only ones avail- 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 6$ 

able for the purposes of learned research and 
devout meditation. 

VI. On the use of Baths and Water as a 
hygienic instrument I can speak with confi- 
dence, as I have frequented various celebrated 
hydropathic institutions, and have carefully 
pondered both the principles and the practice 
of that therapeutic discipline. Hydropathy is 
a name that very inadequately expresses the 
virtue of the treatment to which it subjects the 
patient It is a well-calculated combination of 
exercise, leisure, diet, amusement, society, and 
water, applied in various ways to stimulate the 
natural perspiratory action of the skin. Any 
one may see that the influences brought to bear 
on the bodily system by such a combination 
are in the highest degree sanitary. The im- 
portant point for students is to be informed 
that parts of this discipline somewhat expen- 
sively pursued in hydropathic institutions under 
the superintendence of experienced physicians, 
can be transferred safely, and at no expense, to 
the routine of their daily life. A regular bath 
in the morning, where water can be had, un- 
less with very feeble and delicate subjects, has 
always an invigorating effect ; but, where water 
is scarce, a wet sheet, dipped in water, and 
well wrung, will serve the purpose equally well. 



yo ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 

The body must be altogether enveloped, and 
well rubbed with this ; and then a dry sheet 
used in the same way will cause a glow to 
come out in the skin, which is the best pre- 
ventive against those disturbances of cuticular 
action which the instability of our northern 
climate render so common and so annoying. 
The wet sheet packing, one of the most bruited 
of the hydropathic appliances, and which in 
fact acts as a mild tepid blister swathing the 
whole body, may be practiced for special pur- 
poses, under the direction of a person expert 
in those matters ; but the virtue of this, as of 
all water applications, depends on the power 
of reaction which the physical system possesses. 
This reaction young men of good constitutions, 
trained by healthy exercise and exposure, will 
always possess ; but persons of a dull and slow 
temperament should beware of making sudden 
experiments with cold water without certain 
precautions and directions from those who are 
more experienced than themselves. 

VII. What I have further to say about health 
belongs to an altogether different chapter. A 
man cannot be kept healthy merely by attend- 
ing to his stomach. If the body, which is the 
support of the curiously complex fabric, acts 
with a sustaining influence on the mind, the 



ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 7 1 

mind, which is the impelling force of the ma- 
chine, may, like steam in a steam-engine, for 
want of a controlling and regulative force, in a 
single fit of untempered expansion, blow all the 
wheels and pegs, and close compacted plates 
of the machine, into chaos. No function of the 
body can be safely performed for a continuance 
without the habitual strong control of a well- 
disciplined will. All merely physical energies 
in man have a strong tendency to run riot into 
fever and dissolution when divorced from the 
superintendence of what Plato called Imperial 
mind (0a<riA.iKos vovs). The music of well-regu- 
lated emotions imparts its harmony to the 
strings of the physical machine ; and freedom 
from the blind plunges of willfulness keeps the 
heart free from those fierce and irregular beat- 
ings which wear out its vitality prematurely. 
Therefore, if you would be healthy, be good ; 
and if you would be good, be wise ; and if you 
would be wise, be devout and reverent, for the 
fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. What 
this means it will be the business of the follow- 
ing chapter to set forth. 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 



Mcyas yap 6 dywv, /xeyas, ox>x ocros Sokci, 
TO \OY)(TTOV rj kolkov yzv£<r6ai> 

Plato. 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 



I. We are now come to the most important 
of the three great chapters of self-culture. The 
moral nature of man supplies him both with the 
motive and the regulative power, being in fact 
the governor, and lord, and legitimate master 
of the whole machine. Moral excellence is 
therefore justly felt to be an indispensable ele- 
ment in all forms of human greatness. A man 
may be as brilliant, as clever, as strong, and as 
broad as you please ; and with all this, if he is 
not good, he may be a paltry fellow ; and even 
the sublime which he seems to reach, in his 
most splendid achievements, is only a brilliant 
sort of badness. The first Napoleon, in his 
thunderous career over our western world, was 
a notable example of superhuman force in a 
human shape, without any real human great- 
ness. It does not appear that he was naturally 
what we should call a bad man ; but, devoting 
himself altogether to military conquest and po- 
litical ascendency, he had no occasion to exer- 



j6 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

cise any degree of that highest excellence 
which grows out of unselfishness, and so, as a 
moral man, he lived and died very poor and 
very small. But it is not only conquerors and 
politicians that, from a defect of the moral ele- 
ment, fail to achieve real greatness. "Noth- 
ing," says Hartley, " can easily exceed the vain- 
glory, self-conceit, arrogance, emulation, and 
envy, that are to be found in the eminent pro- 
fessors of the sciences, mathematics, natural 
philosophy, and even divinity itself." 1 Nor is 
there any reason to be astonished at this. The 
moral nature, like everything else, if it is to 
grow into any sort of excellence, demands a 
special culture ; and, as our passions, by their 
very nature, like the winds, are not easy of con- 
trol, and our actions are the outcome of our 
passions, it follows that moral excellence will 
in no case be an easy affair, and in its highest 
grades will be the most arduous, and, as such, 
the most noble achievement of a thoroughly 
accomplished humanity. It was an easy thing 
for Lord Byron to be a great poet ; it was 
merely indulging his nature ; he was an eagle, 
and must fly ; but to have curbed his willful hu- 
mor, soothed his fretful discontent, and learned 
to behave like a reasonable being and a gentle- 
man, that was a difficult matter, which he does 

1 Obiei"vatiom on Man. London, 1749. Vol. ii. p. 255. 



ON MORAL CULTURE. Jf 

not seem ever seriously to have attempted. 
His life, therefore, with all his genius, and fits 
of occasional sublimity, was, on the whole, a 
terrible failure, and a great warning to all who 
are willing to take a lesson. Another flaring 
beacon of rock, on which great wits are often 
wrecked for want of a little kindly culture of 
unselfishness, is Walter Savage Landor, the 
most finished master of style, perhaps, that 
ever used the English tongue ; but a person at 
the same time, so imperiously willful, and so 
majestically cross-grained, that, with all his pol- 
ished style and pointed thought, he was con- 
stantly living on the verge of insanity. Let 
every one, therefore, who would not suffer ship- 
wreck on the great voyage of life, stamp seri- 
ously into his soul, before all things, the great 
truth of the Scripture text, — " One thing is 
needful." Money is not needful ; power is 
not needful ; cleverness is not needful ; fame is 
not needful ; liberty is not needful ; even health 
is not the one thing needful : but character 
alone — a thoroughly cultivated will — is that 
which can truly save us ; and, if we are not 
saved in this sense, we must certainly be 
damned. There is no point of indifference in 
this matter, where a man can safely rest, say- 
ing to himself, If I don't get better, I shall cer- 
tainly not get worse. He will unquestionably 



?8 . ON MORAL CULTURE. 

get worse. The unselfish part of his nature, 
if left uncultivated, will, like every other neg- 
lected function, tend to shrink into a more 
meagre vitality and more stunted proportions. 
Let us gird up our loins, therefore, and quit 
us like men ; and, having by the golden gift of 
God the glorious lot of living once for all, let 
us endeavor to live nobly. 

II. It may be well, before entering into any 
detail, to indicate, in a single word, the con- 
nection between morality and piety, which is 
not always correctly understood. A certain 
school of British moralists, from Jeremy Ben- 
tham downwards, have set themselves to tabu- 
late a scheme of morals without any reference 
to religion, which, to say the least of it, is a 
very unnatural sort of divorce, and a plain sign 
of a certain narrowness and incompleteness in 
the mental constitution of those who advocate 
such views. No doubt a professor of wisdom, 
like old Epicurus, may be a very good man, as 
the world goes, and lead a very clean life, be- 
lieving that all the grand mathematical struct- 
ure of this magnificent universe is the product 
of a mere fortuitous concourse of blind atoms ; 
as, in these days, I presume, there are few more 
virtuous men than some who talk of laws of 
Nature, invariable sequence, natural selection, 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 79 

favorable conditions, happy combination of ex- 
ternal circumstances, and other such reasonless 
phrases as may seem to explain the frame of 
the universe apart from mind. But to a healthy 
human feeling there must always be something 
very inadequate, say rather something abnor- 
mal and monstrous, in this phasis of morality. 
It is as if a good citizen in a monarchy were to 
pay all the taxes conscientiously, serve his time 
in the army, and fight the battles of his coun- 
try bravely, but refuse to take off his hat to the 
queen when she passed. If we did not note 
such a fellow altogether with a black mark, as 
a disloyal and disaffected subject, we should 
feel a good-natured contempt for him, as a 
crotchety person and unmannerly. So it is ex- 
actly with atheists, whether speculative or prac- 
tical ; they are mostly crotchet-mongers and 
puzzle-brains ; fellows who spin silken ropes 
in which to strangle themselves ; at most, mere 
reasoning machines, utterly devoid of every 
noble inspiration, whose leaden intellectual fir- 
mament has no heat and no color, whose whole 
nature is exhausted in fostering a prim self- 
contained conceit about their petty knowledges, 
and who can, in fact, fasten their coarse feelers 
upon nothing but what they can finger, and 
classify, and tabulate, and dissect. But there 
is something that stands above all fingering, 



80 OAT MORAL CULTURE. 

all microscopes, and all curious diagnosis, and 
that is, simply, Life ; and life is simply ener- 
gizing Reason, and energizing Reason is only 
another name for God. To ignore this su- 
preme fact is to attempt to conceive the steam- 
engine without the intellect of James Watt ; it 
is to make a map of the aqueducts that sup- 
ply a great city with water, without indicating 
the fountain-head from which they are supplied ; 
it is to stop short of the one fact which renders 
all the other facts possible ; it is to leave the 
body without the head. By no means, there- 
fore, let a young man satisfy himself with any 
of those cold moral schemes of the present age 
of reaction, which piece together a beggarly 
ac -sunt of duties from external induction. 
The fountain of all the nobler morality is 
moral inspiration from within ; and the feeder 
of this fountain is God. 

III. I will now specialize a few of those 
virtues the attainment of which should be an 
object of lofty ambition to young men desirous 
of making the most of the divine gift of life. 
Every season and every occasion makes its 
own imperious demand, and presents its pecul- 
iar opportunity of glorious victory or ignoble 
defeat in the great battle of existence. Prim- 
roses grow only in the spring ; and certain 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 8 1 

virtues, if they do not put forth vigorous shoots 
in youth, are not likely to show any luxuriant 
leafage in after age. 

IV. First, there is Obedience. There is a 
great talk in these days about liberty ; and no 
doubt liberty is a very good thing, and highly 
estimated by all healthy creatures ; but it is 
necessary that we should understand exactly 
what this thing means. It means only that in 
the exercise of all natural energies, each crea- 
ture shall be free from every sort of conven- 
tional, artificial, and painful restriction. Such 
liberty is unquestionably an unqualified good, 
but it does not bring a man very far. It fixes 
only the starting-point in the race of life. It 
gives a man a stage to play on, but it says 
nothing of the part he has to play, or of the 
style in which he must play it. Beyond this 
necessary starting-point, all further action in 
life, so far from being liberty, is only a series 
of limitations. All regulation is limitation ; 
and regulation is only another name for rea- 
soned existence. And, as the regulations to 
which men must submit are not always or 
generally those which they have willingly laid 
down for themselves, but rather for the most 
part those which have been laid down by others 

for the general good of society, it follows, that 
6 



82 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

whosoever will be a good member of any social 
system must learn, in the first place, to Obey. 
The law, the army, the church, the state ser- 
vice, every field of life, and every sphere of 
action, are only the embodied illustrations of 
this principle. Freedom, of course, is left 
to the individual in his own individual sphere. 
To leave him no freedom were to make him 
a mere machine, and to annihilate his human- 
ity ; but, so far as he acts in a social capacity, 
he cannot be free from the limitations that 
bind the whole into a definite and consistent 
unity. He may be at the very top of the 
social ladder, but, like the Pope — servus 
servorum — only the more a slave for that. 
The brain can no more disown the general 
laws of the organism than the foot can. The 
royal obedience of each member is at once 
its duty and its safety. St. Paul, with his 
usual force, fervor, and sagacity, has grandly 
illustrated this text ; and if you ever feel in- 
clined fretfully to kick against your special 
function in the great social organism, I advise 
you to make a serious reading of I Cor. xii. 
14-31. Every random or willful move is a 
chink opened in the door, which, if it be taught 
tc gape wider, will in due season let in chaos. 
The Roman historian records it as a notable 
trait in the great Punic captain's character, 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 83 

that he knew equally well to obey and to 
command, — " Nunquam ingenium idem ad res 
diversissimas, parendum atque imperandum 
habilius ficit" Opposite things, no doubt, 
obedience and command are ; but the one, 
nevertheless, is the best training-school for 
the other; for he who has been accustomed 
only to command will not know the limita- 
tions by which, for its own beneficial exercise, 
all authority is bound. Let the old Roman 
submission to authority be cultivated by all 
young men as a virtue at once most charac- 
teristically social, and most becoming in un- 
ripe years. Let the thing commanded by a 
superior authority be done simply because it 
is commanded, and let it be done with punc- 
tuality. Nothing commends a young man so 
much to his employers as accuracy and punc- 
tuality in the conduct of business. And no 
wonder. On each man's exactitude in doing 
his special best depends the comfortable and 
easy going of the whole machine. In the 
complicated tasks of social life no genius and 
no talent can compensate for the lack of obe- 
dience. If the clock goes fitfully, nobody 
knows the time of day ; and, if your allotted 
task is a necessary link in the chain of an- 
other man's work, you are his clock, and he 
ought to be able to rely on you. The great- 



84 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

est praise that can be given to the member 
of any association is in these terms : — This 
is a man who always does what is. required 
of him, and who always appears at the hour 
when he is expected to appear. 

v v V. The next grand virtue which a young 
man should specially cultivate is Truthful- 
ness. I believe, with Plato, that a lie is a 
thing naturally hateful both to gods and men ; 
and young persons specially are naturally 
truthful ; but fear and vanity, and various in- 
fluences, and interests affecting self, may check 
and overgrow this instinct, so as to produce 
a very hollow and worthless manhood. John 
Stuart Mill, in one of his political pamphlets, 
told the working classes of England that they 
were mostly liars ; and yet he paid them the 
compliment of saying that they were the only 
working class in Europe who were inwardly 
ashamed of the baseness which they practiced. 
A young man in his first start of life should 
impress on his mind strongly that he lives 
in a world of stern realities, where no mere 
show can permanently assert itself as sub- 
stance. In his presentment as a member of 
society he should take a sacred care to be 
more than he seems, not to seem more than 

he is. Ov yap Sok€?v apicrros dAA' eti/ai 0£kti. Who- 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 85 

ever in any special act is studious to make an 
outward show, to which no inward substance 
corresponds, is acting a lie, which may help 
him out of a difficulty perhaps for the occa- 
sion, but, like silvered copper, will be found 
out in due season. Plated work will never 
stand the tear and wear of life like the genu- 
ine metal ; believe this. What principally in- 
duces men to act this sort of social lie is, 
with persons in trade, love of gain ; but with 
young men, to whom I now speak, either lazi- 
ness, vanity, or cowardice ; and against these 
three besetting sins, therefore, a young man 
should set a special guard. Lazy people are 
never ready with the right article when it is 
wanted, and accordingly they present a false 
one, as when a schoolboy, when called upon 
to translate a passage from a Greek or Latin 
author, reads from a translation on the op- 
posite page. What is this but a lie ? The 
teacher wishes to know what you have in your 
brain, and you give him what you take from 
a piece of paper, not the produce of your 
brain at all. All flimsy, shallow, and super- 
ficial work, in fact, is a Lie, of which a man 
ought to be ashamed. Vanity is another pro- 
vocative of lies. From a desire to appear well 
before others, young men, who are naturally 
ignorant and inexperienced, will sometimes be 



86 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

tempted to pretend that they know more than 
they actually do know, and may thus get into 
a habit of dressing up their little with the air 
and attitude of much, in such a manner as to 
convey a false impression of their own im- 
portance. Let a man learn as early as pos- 
sible honestly to confess his ignorance, and 
he will be a gainer by it in the long run ; 
otherwise the trick by which he veils his ig- 
norance from others may become a habit by 
which he conceals it from himself, and learns 
to spend his whole life in an element of de- 
lusive show, to which no reality corresponds. 
But it is from deficiency of courage rather 
than from the presence of vanity that a young 
man may expect to be most sorely tried. Con- 
ceit, which is natural to youth, is sure to be 
pruned down ; the whole of society is in a 
state of habitual conspiracy to lop the over^ 
weening self-estimate of any of its members ; 
but a little decent cowardice is always safe ; 
and those who begin life by being afraid to 
speak what they think, are likely to end it by 
being afraid to think what they wish. Moral 
courage is unquestionably, if the most manly, 
certainly the rarest of the social virtues. The 
most venerated traditions and institutions of 
society, and even some of the kindliest and 
most finely-fibred affections, are in not a few 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 8/ 

cases arrayed against its exercise ; and in such 
cases to speak the truth boldly requires a com- 
bination of determination and of tact, of which 
not every man is capable. Neither, indeed, 
is it desirable always to speak all the truth 
that a man may happen to know ; there is no 
more offensive thing than truth, when it runs 
counter to certain great social interests, asso- 
ciations, and passions ; and offence, though it 
must sometimes be given, ought never to be 
courted. To these matters the text applies, 
" Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as 
doves." Nevertheless there are occasions when 
a man must speak boldly out, even at the risk 
of plucking the beard of fair authority some- 
what rudely. If he does not do so he is a 
coward and a poltroon, and not the less so 
because he has nine hundred and ninety-nine 
lily-livered followers at his back. 

« 

VI. I don't know a better advice to a young 
man than never to be idle. It is one of 
those negative sort of precepts that impart no 
motive force to the will • but though negations 
seem barren to keep out the devil by a strong 
bolt, they may prove in the end not the worst 
receipt for admitting the good spirit into con- 
fidence. A man certainly should not circum- 
scribe his activity by any inflexible fence of 



88 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

rigid rules ; such a formal methodism of con- 
duct springs from narrowness, and can only 
end in more narrowness ; but it is of the utmost 
importance to commence early with an econom- 
ical use of time, and this is only possible by 
means of order and system. No young person 
can go far wrong who devotes a certain amount 
of time regularly to a definite course of work ; 
how much that portion of time should be, of 
course depends on circumstances ; but let it, 
at all events, be filled up with a prescribed con- 
tinuity of something ; one hour a day per- 
sistently devoted to one thing, like a small seed, 
will yield a' large increase at the year's end. 
Random activity, jumping from one thing to 
another without a plan, is little better, in re- 
spect of any valuable intellectual result, than 
absolute idleness. An idle man is like a house- 
keeper who keeps the doors open for any burg- 
lar. It is a grand safeguard when a man can 
say, I have no time for nonsense ; no call for 
unreasonable dissipation ; no need for that sort 
of stimulus which wastes itself in mere titilla- 
tion- ; variety of occupation is my greatest pleas- 
ure, and when my task is finished I know how 
to lie fallow, and with soothing rest prepare 
myself for another bout of action. The best 
preventive against idleness is to start with the 
deep-seated conviction of the earnestness of 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 89 

life. Whatever men say of the world, it is 
certainly no stage for trifling ; in a scene where 
all are at work idleness can lead only to wreck 
and ruin: " Life is short, art long, op- 
portunity FLEETING, EXPERIMENT SLIPPERY, 

judgment difficult." These are the first 
words of the medical aphorisms of the wise 
Hippocrates ; they were set down as a signif- 
icant sign at the porch of the benevolent sci- 
ence of healing more than 500 years before the 
Christian era ; and they remain still, the wisest 
text which a man can take with him as a direc- 
tory into any sphere of effective social activity. 

VII. If we look around us in the world with 
a view to discover what is the cause of the sad 
deficiency of energy often put forth in the best 
of causes, we shall find that it arises generally 
from some sort of Narrowness. A man will 
not help you in this or that noble, undertaking 
simply because he has no sympathy with it. 
Not a few persons are a sort of human lobsters ; 
they live in a hard shell formed out of some 
professional, ecclesiastical, political, or classical 
crust, and cautiously creep their way within 
certain beaten bounds, beyond which they have 
no desires. The meagre and unexpansive life 
of such persons teaches us what we want in 
order to attain to a wider and a richer range of 



90 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

social vitality. The octogenarian poet-philos- 
opher Goethe, when sinking into the darkness 
of death, called out with his last breath, More 
light ! What every young man should call 
out daily, if he wishes to save himself from the 
narrowing crust of professional and other lim- 
itations, is, More love ! Men are often clever 
enough, but they don't know what to do with 
their cleverness ; they are good swordsmen, but 
they have no cause to fight for, or prefer fight- 
ing in a bad cause. What these men want is 
Love. The precept of the great Apostle, " Weep 
with those who weep, and rejoice with those who 
rejoice^ if it were grandly carried out would 
make every man's life as rich in universal 
sympathy as Shakespeare's imagination was in 
universal imagery. Every man cannot be a 
poet ; but every man may give himself some 
trouble to cultivate that kindly and genial 
sensibility on which the writing and the ap- 
preciation of poetry depends. To live poetry, 
indeed, is always better than to write it ; better 
for the individual, and better for society. Now 
a poetical life is just a life opposed to all same- 
ness and all selfishness ; eagerly seizing upon 
the good and beautiful from all quarters, as on 
its proper aliment. Let a young man, therefore, 
above all things, beware of shutting himself up 
within a certain narrow pale of sympathy, and 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 9 1 

fostering unreasonable hatreds and prejudices 
against others. An honest hater is often a 
better fellow than a cool friend ; but it is 
better not to hate at all. A good man will as 
much as possible strive to be shaken out of 
himself, and learn to study the excellences of 
persons and parties to whom he is naturally 
opposed. It was an admirable trait in the 
character of the late distinguished head of the 
utilitarian school of ethics, who was brought 
up according to the strictest sect of a narrow 
and unsympathetic school, that he could apply 
himself in the spirit of kindly recognition to 
comprehend two such antipodal characters as 
Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Never allow 
yourself to indulge in sneering condemnations 
of large classes and sections of your fellow be- 
ings ; that sort of talk sounds big, but is in fact 
puerile. Never refuse to entertain a man in 
your heart because all the world is talking 
against him, or because he belongs to some 
sect or party that everybody despises ; if he is 
universally talked against, as has happened to 
many of the best men in certain circumstances, 
there is only so much the more need that he 
should receive a friendly judgment from you. 
" Honor all men " is one of the many texts of 
combined sanctity and sapience with which the 
New Testament abounds ; but this you cannot 



92 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

do unless you try to know all men ; and you 
know no man till you have looked with the 
eye of a brother into the best that is . in him. 
To do this is the true moral philosophy, the 
best human riches ; a wealth which, when you 
have quarried, you can proceed, as a good 
social architect, to build up the truth in love, 
with regard to all men, and make your deeds 
in every point as genuine as your words. (/ ^ 

VIII. There is a class of young men in the 
present age on whose face one imagines that he 
sees written Nil Admirari. This is not at all 
a lovable class of the " youth-head" of our 
land ; and, unless the tone of not wondering 
which characterizes their manner be a sort of 
juvenile affectation destined soon to pass away, 
rather a hopeless class. Wonder, as Plato has 
it, is a truly philosophic passion ; the more we 
have of it, accompanying the reverent heart, 
of course with a clear open eye, so much the 
better. That it should be specially abundant 
in the opening scenes of life is in the healthy 
course of nature ; and to be deficient in it argues 
either insensibility, or that indifference, selfish- 
ness, and conceit, which are sometimes found 
combined with a shallow sort of cleverness that, 
with superficial observers readily passes for 
true talent. In opposition to this most un- 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 93 

natural, ungenial habitude of mind, we say to 
every young man, cultivate Reverence. You 
will not see much of this virtue, perhaps, in the 
democratic exhibitions in which the present 
age delights ; -but it is the true salt of the soul 
for all that. 

" We live by admiration, hope, and love." 

We are small creatures, the biggest of us, and 
our only chance of becoming great in a sort is 
by participation in the greatness of the universe. 
St. John, in a beautiful passage of his First 
Epistle, has finely indicated the philosophy of 
this matter. " Beloved, now are we the sons 
of God ; and it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be ; but we know that when He shall ap- 
pear, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see 
Him as He is ; " — that is to say, to look with 
admiring rapture on a type of perfect excellence 
is the way to become assimilated to that excel- 
lence ; -what the uncorrupted man sees in such 
cases he admires ; and what he admires he 
imitates. The chief end of man, according to 
the Stoics, was, — " Spectare et imitari mun- 
dum ! " — a fine thought, and finely expressed. 
But how shall a man see when he has no 
admiring faculty which shall lead him to see, 
and how shall he imitate what he does not 
know ? All true appreciation is the result of 
keen insi'ght and noble passion ; but the habit 



94 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

of despising things and persons, and holding 
them cheap, blinds the one factor which belongs 
to the complete result, and strangles the other. 

IX. In morals there are principles of inspi- 
ration and principles of regulation : love and 
reverence, of which we have been speaking, be- 
long to the former ; Moderation, of which we 
are now to speak, belongs to the latter. It is 
a virtue of which young men generally have no 
conception, and for deficiency in which they are 
lightly pardoned ; but it is a virtue not the less 
necessary for that, and if they will not learn it 
in what medical men call the prophylactic way, 

— that is, timeously, before the touch of danger, 

— they will have to learn it at no very long date 
from perilous experience. To hot young blood 
it is an admonition which sounds as cheap as it 
is distasteful, to beware of excess ; but hot young 
blood, which knows well enough how to dash 
full gallop into a forest of bristling spears, is no 
judge of that caution which is not less neces- 
sary than courage to the issue of a successful 
campaign. The coolest and most practical 
thinker of all antiquity, and at the same time 
the man of the widest range of accurate knowl- 
edge, Aristotle, whose name is almost a guar- 
anty for right opinion in all things, laid it 
down as the most useful rule to guide men in 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 95 

the difficult art of living, that virtue or wise 
action lies in the mean between the two ex- 
tremes of too little and too much. Those who 
are just starting in the career of life, however 
fond they may be of strong phrases, strong 
passions, unbridled energies, and exuberant 
demonstrations of all kinds, may rely on it, 
that as they grow in true manhood they will 
grow in all sorts of moderation, and learn to 
recognize the great truth that those are the 
strongest men, not who the most wantonly in- 
dulge, but who the most carefully curb their 
activities. What is called " seediness," after a 
debauch, is a plain proof that Nature has been 
outraged, *and will have her penalty. All de- 
bauch is incipient suicide ; it is the unseen 
current beneath the house which sooner or later 
washes away the foundations. So it is with 
study. Long-continued intense mental exercise, 
especially in that ungrateful and ungenial form 
of the acquisition of knowledge called Cram, 
weakens the brain, disorders the stomach, and 
makes the general action of the whole organism 
languid and unemphatic. Be warned, therefore, 
in time ; violent methods will certainly produce 
violent results ; and a vessel that once gets a 
crack, though it may be cunningly mended, will 
never stand such rough usage as a whole one. 
Wisdom is a good thing ; but it is not good 



96 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

even to be wise always. " Be not wise over- 
much : Why shouldst thou die before thy time ?" 
Remember who said that. 

X. If Great Britain be unquestionably the 
richest country in the world, — so much so in- 
deed that Sidney Smith, always witty and 
always wise, felt himself justified in saying, that 
it is " the only country in which poverty is a 
crime," then certainly it is of paramount impor- 
tance that every young man, when starting in 
the race of life in this country, should stamp 
into his soul the fundamental principle of all 
moral philosophy, that the real dignity of a man 
lies not in what he has, but in what he is. " The 
kingdom of heaven is within you," — not with- 
out. Beware, therefore, of being infected by 
the moral contagion which more or less taints 
the atmosphere of every rich trading and manu- 
facturing community, — the contagion which 
breeds a habit of estimating the value of men 
by the external apparatus of life rather than by 
its internal nobility. A dwarf, perched upon a 
lofty platform, looks over the heads of the mul- 
titude, and has no doubt this advantage from 
his position. So it is with the rich man who is 
merely rich ; he acquires a certain social posi- 
tion, and from this, perhaps, gets M. P. tagged 
to his name ; but, take the creature down from 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 97 

his artificial elevation, and look him fairly in 
the face, and you will find that he is a figure 
too insignificant to measure swords with. Fix 
this, therefore, in your minds, before all things, 
that there are few things in social life more 
contemptible than a rich man who stands upon 
his riches. By the very act of placing so high 
a value on the external, he has lapsed from the 
true character of his kind, and inverted the 
poles of human value. Have money, — by all 
means, — as much as to enable you to pay your 
tailor's bill, and, if possible, have a comfortable 
glass of claret or port to help you to digest 
your dinner ; but never set your heart on what 
they call making a fortune. Socrates, Plato, 
Aristotle, and St. Paul (1 Tim. vi. 9), all agree 
in stating, with serious emphasis, that money- 
making is not an ennobling occupation, and 
that he who values money most values himself 
least. Stand strictly on your moral and intel- 
lectual excellence, and you will find in the long 
run, when the true value of things comes out, 
that there is not a duke or a millionaire in the 
land who can boast himself your superior. 

XI. I have no intention of running through 
the catalogue of the virtues, — you must go to 
Aristotle for that ; but one grace of character, 
which is an essential element of moral great- 



98 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

ness, and a sure pledge of all kinds of success, 
I cannot omit, and that is Perseverance. I 
never knew a man good for anything in the 
world, who, when he got a piece of work to do, 
did not know how to stick to it. The poet 
Wordsworth, in his " Excursion," when the sky 
began to look cloudy, gives, as a reason for go- 
ing on with his mountain perambulation, that 
though a little rain might be disagreeable 
to the skin, the act of giving up a fixed pur- 
pose, in view of a slight possible inconvenience, 
is dangerous to the character. There is much 
wisdom here. We do not live in a world in 
which a man can afford to be discouraged by 
trifles. There are real difficulties enough, with 
which to fight is to live, and which to conquer 
is to live nobly. A friend of mine, making the 
ascent of Ben Cruachan, when he had reached 
what he imagined to be the top, found that the 
real peak was two miles farther on to the west, 
and that the road to it lay along a rough stony 
ridge not easy for weary feet to tread on. But 
this was a small matter. The peak was being 
enveloped in mist, and it was only an hour 
from sunset. He wisely determined to take the 
nearest way down ; but what did he do next 
day ? He ascended the Ben again, and took 
his dinner triumphantly on the topmost top, 
in order, as he said, that the name of this most 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 99 

beautiful of Highland Bens might not forever 
be associated in his mind with bafflement and 
defeat. This sort of a man, depend upon it, 
will succeed in everything he undertakes. 
Never boggle at a difficulty, especially at the 
commencement of a new work. Aller Anfang 
ist schwer, — all beginnings are difficult, as the 
German proverb says ; and the more excellent 
the task the greater the difficulty. XaAeTra T a 
koX*. Difficult things, in fact, are the only 
things worth doing, and they are done by a de- 
termined will and a strong hand. In the world 
of action will is power ; persistent will, with 
circumstances not altogether unfavorable, is 
victory ; nay, in the face of circumstances alto- 
gether unfavorable, persistency will carve out a 
way to unexpected success. Read the life of 
Frederick the Great of Prussia, and you will 
understand what this means. Fortune never 
will favor the man who flings away the dice- 
box because the first throw brings a low num- 
ber. 

I will now conclude with a few remarks on 
some of the best methods of acquiring moral 
excellence. 

XII. The first thing to be attended to here 
is to have it distinctly and explicitly graved 



100 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

into the soul, that there is only one thing that 
can give significance and dignity to human 
life — viz. Virtuous Energy; and that this 
energy is attainable only by energizing. If 
you imagine you are to be much helped by 
books, and reasons, and speculations, and 
learned disputations, in this matter, you are 
altogether mistaken. Books and discourses 
may indeed awaken and arouse you, and per- 
haps hold up the sign of a wise finger-post to 
prevent you from going astray at the first start, 
but they cannot move you a single step on the 
road ; it is your own legs only that can perform 
the journey ; it is altogether a matter of doing. 
Finger-posts are very well where you find 
them ; but the sooner you can learn to do 
without them the better ; for you will not 
travel long, depend upon it, before you come 
into regions of moor, and mist, and bog, and 
far waste solitudes ; and woe be to the way- 
farer, in such case, who has taught himself to 
travel only by finger-posts and milestones ! 
You must have a compass of sure direction in 
your own soul, or you may be forced to depend 
for your salvation on some random saviour, 
who is only a little less bewildered than your- 
self. Gird up your loins therefore, and prove 
the all-important truth, that as you learn to 
walk only by walking, to leap by leaping, and 



ON MORAL CULTURE. IOI 

to fence by fencing, so you can learn to live 
nobly only by acting nobly on every occasion 
that presents itself. If you shirk the first trial 
of your manhood, you will come so much the 
weaker to the second ; and if the next occasion, 
and the next again, finds you unprepared, you 
will infallibly sink into baseness. A swimmer 
becomes strong to stem the tide only by fre- 
quently breasting the big waves. If you prac- 
tice always in shallow waters, your heart will 
assuredly fail you in the hour of high flood. 
General notions about sin and salvation can do 
you no good in the way of the blessed life. As 
in a journey, you must see milestone after mile- 
stone fall into your rear, otherwise you remain 
stationary : so, in the grand march of a noble 
life, one paltriness after another must disap- 
pear, or you have lost your chance. 

XI II. Richter gives it as one excellent anti- 
dote against moral depression, to call up in our 
darkest moments the memory of our brightest ; 
so, in the dusty struggle and often tainted 
atmosphere of daily business, it is well to carry 
about with us the purifying influence of a high 
ideal of human conduct, fervidly and powerfully 
expressed. Superstitious persons carry amulets 
externally on their breasts : carry you a select 
store of holy texts within, and you will be much 



102 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

more effectively armed against the powers of 
evil than any most absolute monarch behind a 
bristling body-guard. Such texts you may find 
occurring in many places, from the Kalidasas 
and Sakyamunis of the East, to Pythagoras, 
Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus, in the West ; 
but if you are wise, and above the seduction of 
showy and pretentious novelties, you will store 
your memory early in youth with the golden 
texts of the Old and New Testaments ; and, as 
the Bible is a big book, — not so much a book, 
indeed, as a great literature in small bulk, — 
perhaps I could not do better in this place than 
indicate for you a few books or chapters which 
you will find it of inestimable value to graft into 
your soul deeply before you come much into 
contact with those persons of coarse moral fibre, 
low aspirations, and lukewarm temperament, 
commonly called men of the world. First, of 
course, there is the Sermon on the Mount, then 
the 13th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corin- 
thians ; then the Gospel of John ; then the 
General Epistle of James ; the two Epistles to 
Timothy ; the 8th chapter of the Romans ; the 
5 th and 6th chapters of the Ephesians ; and the 
same chapters of the Galatians. In the Old 
Testament every day's experience will reveal to 
you more clearly the profound wisdom of the 
Book of Proverbs. As a guide through life it 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 



103 



is not possible to find a better directory than 
this book ; and I remember the late Principal 
Lee, who knew Scotland well, saying with em- 
phasis, that our country owed no small part of 
the practical sagacity for which it is so famed, 
to an early familiarity with this body of prac- 
tical wisdom, which, in old times, used to be 
printed separately, and found in every man's 
pocket. For seasons of devout meditation, of 
course, the Psalms of the great minstrel monarch 
are more to be commended ; and among them 
I should recommend specially, as calculated 
to infuse a spirit of deep and catholic piety 
into the souls of the young, — Psalms i. viii. 
xix. xxiv. xxxii. xxxvii. xlix. li. liii. lxxiii. xc. ciii. 
civ. cvii. cxxi. cxxxi. cxxxiii. And these Psalms 
ought not only to be frequently read, till they 
make rich the blood of the soul with a genial 
and generous piety, but they ought to be sung 
to their proper music till they create round us 
a habitual atmosphere of pure and elevated 
sentiment, which we breathe as the breath of 
our higher life. This is the sort of emotional 
drill which that grand old heathen Plato enjoins 
with such eloquence in some of the wisest 
1 chapters of his lofty-minded polity, but a drill 
which we British Christians, with all our pre- 
tensions, in these latter times seem somewhat 
backward to understand, 



104 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

XIV. Perhaps even more important towards 
the achievement of a noble life than a memory 
well stored with sacred texts, is an imagination 
well decorated with heroic pictures ; in other 
words, there is no surer method of becoming 
good, and it may be great also, than an early 
familiarity with the lives of great and good 
men. So far as my experience goes, there is 
no kind of sermon so effective as the example 
of a great man. Here we see the thing done 
before us, — actually done, — a thing of which 
we were not even dreaming ; and the voice 
speaks forth to us with a potency like the voice 
of many waters, " Go thou and do likewise!' 
Why not ? No doubt, not every man is a hero ; 
and heroic opportunities are not given every 
day ; but if you cannot do the same thing, 
you may do something like it ; if you are not 
planted on as high or as large a stage, you can 
show as much manhood, and manifest as much 
virtuous persistency, on a small scale. Every 
man may profit by the example of truly great 
men, if he is bent on making the most of him- 
self and his circumstances. It is altogether a 
delusion to measure the greatness of men by 
the greatness of the stage on which they act, or 
the volume of the sound with which the world 
loves to. reverberate their achievements. A 
Moltke in council, on the eve of a great battle 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 105 

which is to shift the centre of gravity of our 
western political system, is only acting on a 
maxim of practical wisdom that requires to be 
applied with as much discrimination, tact, and 
delicacy, by the provost of a provincial town 
planning a water-bill or a tax for the improve- 
ment of the city. Nay, that moral heroism is 
often greatest of which the world says least, 
and which is exercised in the humblest spheres, 
and in circles the most unnoticed. Let us 
therefore turn our youthful imaginations into 
great picture-galleries and Walhallas of the 
heroic souls of all times and all places ; and we 
shall be incited to follow after good, and be 
ashamed to commit any sort of baseness in the 
direct view of such " a cloud of witnesses. " 
Would you know what faith means, leave Cal- 
vinists and Arminians to split straws about 
points of doctrine ; but do you read and digest 
that splendid eleventh chapter of the Hebrews, 
and you will escape forever from the netted 
snares of theological logomachy. In this sub- 
lime chapter the great Apostle is merely giv- 
ing a succinct summation of the method of 
teaching by concrete examples, with which the 
Scriptures are so richly studded, and of which 
our modern sermons are mostly so destitute. 
When I see our young men lolling on sofas, 
and grinning over those sorry caricatures of 



106 ON MORAL CULTURE, 

humanity with which the pages of Thackeray 
and other popular novelists are filled, I often 
wonder what sort of a human life can be ex- 
pected to grow up from that early habit of 
learning to sneer, or at best, to be amused, at 
an age when seriousness and devout admira- 
tion are the only seeds out of which any future 
nobleness can be expected to grow. For my- 
self, I honestly confess that I never could learn 
anything from Thackeray ; there is a certain 
feeble amiability even about his best characters, 
which, if it is free from the depressing in- 
fluence of his bad ones, is certainly anything 
but bracing. One of the best of Greek books, 
once in everybody's hands, now, I fear, fallen 
considerably into the shade, is Plutarch. 1 Here 
you have, whether for youth or manhood, in the 
shape of living examples of the most rich and 
various type, the very stuff from which human 
efficiency must ever be made. Our accurate 
critical historians have a small educational 
value when set against that fine instinct for all 
true human greatness, and that genial sympathy 
with all human weakness, which shine out so 
conspicuously in the classical picture-gallery 
of that rare old Boeotian. Let therefore our 
young men study to make themselves familiar, 

1 " I read with great delight Langhorne's translation of 
Plutarch. " — J. S. Mill, Autobiography, 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 10/ 

not with the fribbles, oddities, and monstrosities 
of humanity, set forth in" fictitious narratives, 
but with the real blood and bone of human 
heroism which the select pages of biography 
present. An Athenian Pericles, with noble 
magnanimity, telling his servant to take a lamp 
and show a scurrilous reviler politely the way 
home ; a German Luther, having his feet shod 
with the gospel of peace, and the sword of the 
Spirit in his hands, marching with cheerful 
confidence against an embattled array of kai- 
sers and cardinals ; a Pastor Oberlin in a 
remote mountain parish of Alsace, flinging be- 
hind him the bland allurements of metropolitan 
preferment, and turning his little rocky, diocese 
into a moral and physical paradise, — these are 
great stereotyped Facts, which should drive 
themselves like goads into the hearts of the 
young.' No man can contradict a fact ; but the 
best fictions, without a deep moral significance 
beneath, are only iridescent froth, beautiful 
now, but which a single puff of air blows into 
nothingness. 

XV. Better, much better, than even the mir- 
ror of greatness in the biographies of truly 
great men, is the living influence of such men 
when you have the happiness of coming in 
contact with them. The best books are only a 



108 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

clever machinery for stirring the nobler nature, 
but they act indirectly and feebly ; they may 
be remote also, dry and dusty upon the library 
shelves, not even on your table, and very far 
from your heart. But a living great man, com- 
ing across your path, carries with him an elec- 
tric influence which you cannot escape — that 
is, of course if you are capable of being affected 
in a noble way, for the blind do not see, and 
the dead do not feel ; and there is a class of 
people — very reputable people perhaps in 
their way — in whose breasts the epiphany of 
a Christ will only excite the remark, " He hath 
a devil!" Supposing, however, that you are 
not one of the Scribes and Pharisees, but a 
young man starting on the journey of life with 
a reverential receptiveness and a delicate sen- 
sibility, such as belong to well-conditioned 
youth, in this case the greatest blessing that 
can happen to you is to come directly into 
contact with some truly great man, and the 
closer the better ; for it is only the morally 
noble, and not the intellectually clever, in 
whom greater intimacy always reveals greater 
excellences. To have felt the thrill of a fervid 
humanity shoot through your veins at the 
touch of a Chalmers, a Macleod, or a Bunsen, 
is to a young man of a fine susceptibility worth 
more than all the wisdom of the Greeks, all the 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 109 

learning of the Germans, and all the sagacity 
of the Scotch. After such a vivific influence, 
the light witlings may sneer as they please, and 
the grave Gamaliels may frown ; but you know 
in whom you have believed, and you believe 
because you have seen, and you grow with a 
happy growth, and your veins are full of sap, 
because you have been engrafted into the stem 
of a true vine. And if it be not your good for- 
tune to come under the direct genial expansive 
virtue of some great moral sun, you are not 
altogether left to chance in the moral influ- 
ences with which you are surrounded. If you 
cannot always avoid the contagion of low com- 
pany, you may at all events ban yourself from 
voluntarily marching into it. There are few 
situations in life where you may not have some 
power of choosing your companions ; and re- 
member that moral contagion, like the infec- 
tious power of physical diseases, borrows half 
its strength from the weakness of the subject 
with which it comes in contact. If you were 
only half as pure as Christ, you might go about 
with harlots and be nothing the worse for it. 
As it is, however, and considering the weak- 
ness of the flesh, and the peculiar temptations 
of puberty, the best thing you can do is to 
make a sacred vow, on no occasion and on no 
account to keep company with persons who 



110 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

will lead you into haunts of dissipation and de- 
bauchery. No amount of hilarious excitement 
or momentary sensuous lustihood can compen- 
sate for the degradation which your moral na- 
ture must suffer by associating, on familiar and 
tolerant terms with the most degraded and 
abandoned of the human species. There can 
be no toleration for vice. We may, yea and 
we ought, to weep for the sinner, but we must 
not sport with the sin. Remember in this re- 
gard what happened to Robert Burns. He 
knew very well how to preach, but his practice 
was a most miserable performance, reminding 
us at every step of the terrible sarcastic sen- 
tence of Pliny, " There is nothing more proud 
or more paltry than Man." Have you care that 
you do not follow the example of that mis- 
chanceful bard, without having his hot blood 
and high-pressure vitality to excuse or to pal- 
liate your follies. Let your company be always, 
where possible, better than yourself; and when 
you have the misfortune to move amongst your 
inferiors, bear in mind this seriously, that if 
you do not seize the apt occasion to draw them 
up to your level — which requires wisdom as 
well as love — they will certainly not be slow 
to drag you down to theirs. 

XVI. " Men may try many things," said the 



ON MORAL CULTURE. Ill 

wise old bard of Weimar ; " only not live at 
random ; " and if you would not live at random, 
it will be necessary for you to fix set times for 
calling yourself to account. In commercial 
transactions it is found a great safeguard against 
debt, to pay for everything, as much as possible, 
in cash, and, where that is not possible, not to 
run long accounts, but to strike clear balances 
at certain set seasons. Exactly so in our ac- 
counts with God and with our souls. The best 
charts and the most accurate compasses will 
bring no profit to the man who does not get 
into the habit of regularly using them. In this 
view the illustrious practice of the old Pytha- 
goreans (who were a church as much as a school) 
presents a good model for us. 

" Let not soft sleep usurp oblivious sway 
Till thrice you've told the deeds that mark'd the day ; 
Whither thy steps ? what thing for thee most fitted 
Was aptly done ? and what good deed omitted ? 
And when you've summed the tale, wipe out the bad 
With gracious grief, and in the good be glad ! " 

No man, in my opinion, will ever attain to high 
excellence in what an excellent old divine calls 
" the life of God in the soul of man," without 
cultivating stated periods of solitude, and using 
that solitude for the important purpose of self- 
knowledge and self-amelioration. " Commune 
with your own heart on your bed, and be still," 
said the Psalmist. 



112 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

" Who never ate with tears his bread, 

And through the long-drawn midnight hours 
Sat weeping on his lonely bed, 
He knows you not, ye heavenly Powers ! " 

are the well-known words of a poet who cer- 
tainly cannot be accused of being either Metho- 
distical in his habits or mawkish in his tone. 
" Let not the sun go down upon your wrath," 
said St. Paul ; — all which utterances plainly 
imply the utility of such stated seasons of moral 
review as the Pythagorean verses prescribe, and 
as we see now in most European countries in 
the institution of the Christian Sabbath waiting 
to be utilized. No doubt the Jewish Sabbath 
was originally instituted simply for the rest of 
the body ; and it was most wise and politic that 
this Christian's " Lord's-day," set apart for a 
purely religious purpose, should have adopted 
this hygienic element also into its composition ; 
but with such a fair arena of enlargement 
opened periodically, bringing perfect freedom 
from the trammels of engrossing professions, he 
is not a wise man who does not devote at least 
one part of the Christian Sabbath to the serious 
work of moral self-review. Not a few severe 
criticisms have been made by foreigners on 
what has been called the " bitter observance " 
of the Sunday by the Scotch ; but these hasty 
critics ought to have reflected how much of the 



ON MORAL CULTURE. J13 

solidity, sobriety, and general reliability of the 
Scottish character is owing to their serious and 
thoughtful observance of these recurrent periods 
of sacred rest. The eternal whirl and fiddle of 
life, so characteristic of our gay Celtic neigh- 
bors across the Channel, is apt to beget an 
excitability and a frivolity in the conduct of 
even, the most serious affairs, which is incom- 
patible with true moral greatness. If we Scotch 
impart somewhat of an awful character to our 
piety by not singing on Sunday, the French 
certainly would march much more steadily, and 
more creditably, on the second day of the week, 
if they cultivated a more sober tone on the 
first. 

XVII. In connection with the delicate func- 
tion of moral self-review, it occurs naturally to 
mention Prayer. In this scientific age, when 
everything is analyzed, and anatomized, and 
tabulated, there is a tendency to talk of knowl- 
edge as a power to which all things are subject. 
But the maxim that knowledge is power is true 
only where knowledge is the main thing wanted. 
There are higher things than knowledge in the 
world ; there are living energies ; and in the 
moral world, certainly, it is not knowledge but 
aspiration that is the moving power, and the 
wing of aspiration is prayer. Where aspiration 



114 0N MORAL CULTURE. 

is wanting, the soul creeps ; it cannot fly ; it 
is at best a caged bird, curiously busy in count- 
ing and classifying the bars of its own confine- 
ment. Of course, we do not mean that any 
person should be so full of his own little self, 
and so ignorant of the grandeur of the universe, 
as to besiege the ear of Heaven with petitions 
that the laws of the universe shall be changed 
any moment that may suit his convenience. 
We do not pray that we may alter the Divine 
decrees, but that our human will may learn to 
move in harmony with the Divine will. How 
far with regard to any special matter, not 
irrevocably fixed in the Divine concatenation 
of possibilities, our petition may prevail, we 
never can tell ; but this we do know, that the 
most natural and the most effectual means of 
keeping our own noblest nature in harmony 
with the source of all vital nobleness, is to hold 
high emotional communion with that source, 
and to plant ourselves humbly in that attitude 
of devout receptiveness which is the one be- 
coming attitude in the created towards the 
Creator. Practically, there is no surer test of 
a man's moral diathesis than the capacity of 
prayer. He, at least in" a Christian country, 
must be an extremely ignorant man, who could 
invoke the Divine blessing day after day, on acts 
of manifest turpitude, falsehood, or folly. In 



ON MORAL CULTURE. 115 

the old heathen times, a man in certain circum- 
stances might perhaps, with a clear conscience, 
have prayed to a Dionysus or an Aphrodite to 
consecrate his acts of drunkenness or de- 
bauchery ; but, thanks to the preaching of the 
Galilean fishermen, we have got beyond that 
now ; and universal experience declares the fact 
that genuine private prayer (for I do not speak 
of course of repeating routine formularies), 
which is the vital element of a noble moral 
nature, is to the coarse, sensual, and selfish 
man, an atmosphere which he cannot breathe. 
Take, therefore, young man, the apostolic 
maxim with you — Pray without ceasing. 
Keep yourself always in an attitude of rever- 
ential dependence on the Supreme Source of 
all good. It is the most natural and speediest 
and surest antidote against that spirit of shallow 
self-confidence and brisk impertinence so apt 
to spring up with the knowledge without 
charity which puffeth up and edifieth not. 
What a pious tradition has taught us to do 
daily before our principal meal, as a comely 
ceremony, let us learn to do before every 
serious act of our life, not as a cold form, but 
as a fervid reality. Go forth to battle, brave 
young man, like David, with your stone ready, 
and your sling well poised ; but be sure that 
you are fighting the battle of the God of Israel, 



Il6 ON MORAL CULTURE. 

not of the devil. Whether you have a sword 
or a pen in your hand, wield neither the one 
nor the other in a spirit of insolent self-reliance 
or of vain self-exhibition ; and, not less in the 
hour of exuberant enjoyment than in the day 
of dark despondency and despair, be always 
ready to say, — " Bless me, even me also, O 
my Father! " 




A BOOK WORTH READING. 

BLACKIE'S 
FOUR PHASES OF MORALS: 

SOCRATES, ARISTOTLE, CHRISTIANITY, AND 
UTILITARIANISM. 

BY 

JOHN STUART BLACKIE, F. R. S. E. 

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 

One volume, i2mo, $1.50. 



Selecting Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, and Utilitarianism as the 
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intersect the activities of every-day life, and where they fall short of meeting 
the demands and necessities of the human soul. The volume is remarkably 
clear and incisive in style, and vigorous and stimulating in thought. 



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The style of these lectures is for the most part plain and always directed to 
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From the Boston Watchman and Reflector. 

We regard this book of Prof Blackie's as containing by far the ablest vin- 
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wide sweep of its thought it takes in all those principles which underlie the 
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From the New York Christian A dvocate. 

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The volume shows a large acquaintance with the subject, and is uniforml 
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ANOTHER GREAT HISTORICAL WORK. 



B>$p IjJiskFg of CffFFrF, 

By Prof. Dr, ERNST CURTIUS. 

Translated by ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, M.A., Fellow of St. Peter's 
College, Cambridge, Prof, of History in Owen's College, Manchester. 

To be completed in four or five vols., crown 8vo, at $2.50 per volume* 

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VOLS. I., II., AND III., NOW READY. 



Curtius' History of Greece is similar in plan and purpose to Mommsen's History of 
Rome, with which it deserves to rank in every respect as one of the great masterpieces of 
historical literature. Avoiding the minute details which overburden other similar works, 
it groups together in a very picturesque manner all the important events in the history of 
this kingdom, which has exercised such a wonderful influence upon the world's civilization. 
The narrative of Prof. Curtius' work is flowing and animated, and the generalizations, 
although bold, are philosophical and sound. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 



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THE DIALOGUES OF PLATO. 

Translated into English, with Analysis and Introductions, by B. JowEyrr, 

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